Documenta 14 at Kassel

Documenta is a momentous contemporary art exhibition. Founded by Arnold Bode in 1955 in the German city of Kassel, the idea in those tragic postwar years was that the country had to start from culture in order to recover its spirit. And such a national rebirth might be aided – also symbolically – by a grand exhibition based in a city that the Allies had razed to the ground as a centre of weapons manufacturing. It’s no coincidence that in the first edition the curator exhibited artworks that the Nazis had sought to erase as “degenerate”.

Since then, the exhibition has taken place on a four-yearly basis and then (for several years now) on a five-yearly basis. Together with a sizeable budget (about 37 million euros), this dilated recurrence lends it prestige and the impression of roundup of the past five years, as well as a springboard for the five years to come. Then again, Documenta has never yielded to the facile. And this year is no exception.

The art director of this 14th edition is Adam Szymczyk, a 46-year-old of Polish origins and former director of Kunsthalle Basel. Alongside an extensive curatorial team, he has conceived an anti-spectacular research exhibition with a time-release factor, filled with interesting names from outside the mainstream. It’s a forward-looking show that also glances back to the ’60s and ’70s, which have a strong presence with their experimentations and utopias. Szymczyk has also complicated the picture by giving the exhibition a second venue: Athens, which not only featured all the artists, but also opened before Kassel.

The Greek capital was singled out because it represents the seedbed of Western culture, and much as Bode proposed in 1955, Szymczyk now suggests that in critical moments it’s from these roots that we need to start again. But Athens was also chosen as a symbol of the current débâcle and problematic clash between the North and South Mediterranean. In this sense, Athens is the ideal reference and backdrop for this exhibition, whose works are united by sensibility towards topical social and political issues: economic tensions and the debts owed by certain countries to certain others; migration and its capacity to shake the foundations of an evidently precarious sense of democracy; the rise of populisms and intolerance; continuing exploitation of the female body, which is unfailingly a political body. But the exhibition also includes the opposite of all this. By revealing disparities rooted in the past and the fragility of equilibriums that have wrongly been considered unquestionable, our attention is kept alive and we are stimulated to develop sensibilities, identifying new reciprocities and forms of exchange.

The exhibition’s structure has accordingly been reconsidered. In a highly symbolic switch, the Fridericianum – Documenta’s historical central venue – is not hosting the exhibition of Szymczyk and his team, but rather the collection of the EMST, the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, which is visiting Germany for the first time. Meanwhile, the Athens site of the EMST – inaugurated for the occasion after a long lag phase – has hosted an ample section of Documenta.

Today’s complex reality emerges in every moment of this exhibition. Of the 160 presented works, many convey the need to identify new possible forms of life and ways of living together. In their central position in front of the Fridericianum, for example, the cabins by Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K stand out as a paradigm of a new genre of urban cohabitation. At the same time, they are formatted but well-equipped shelters: intimate spaces arranged inside sections of concrete tubes, which are stacked on top of one another to form a veritable housing block.

Other works confront us with the harshness of the situation, with no half measures. Suffice it to mention Artur Zmijewski’s video titled Glimpse. In the 20-minute piece, the artist’s gaze wanders around the inhabitants of the Calais Jungle on the point of being evacuated. The video lingers on the faces of people now reduced to silence, hovering at the doors of the dwellings they must abandon. These dwellings may be pitiful, but they are nonetheless dwellings. It also pauses on their bodies and all the stuff that’s been abandoned there because it couldn’t be carted away. The video leaves no escape and stirs deep unease.

On a different level, but equally powerful, are the delirious and sarcastic works by Roee Rosen. He is the lucid critical voice of a country – Israel – in which self-control and repression underlie much collective behaviour. Two examples are his installation of drawings titled Live and Die as Eva Braun, exhibited in Athens, and the recent The Dust Channel shown in Kassel. Set in a middle-class house, this video-operetta reveals repressed experiences and gives paradoxical shape to the psychological regression generated by fear and obsession with defence. Rosen’s works are so scathing and hard-hitting that they become anti-aesthetic and profoundly “disturbing”. Equally “disturbing” are the sexed paintings by Swiss artist Miriam Cahn (1949), while the self-portraits painted with feet and mouth by the beautiful Lorenza Böttner, originally named Ernst Lorenz Böttner, are perturbing. Meanwhile, the work of porno activist Annette Sprinkle (active since the ’60s) with Beth Stephens is based on an invitation to closeness and empathetic participation. In Athens, Sprinkle organised a cuddling session in a large bed located in the middle of the EMST, while in Kassel she has invited visitors to share a paradoxical “Ecosexual Walking Tour”, based on an appeal to “make love with the Earth”.

Closeness, in another sense, is also highlighted by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, who, in her installation titled Matanzas Sound Map, connects fragments of two problematic but vibrant cities – Athens and Matanzas – the latter also being known as the “Athens of Cuba”, where she was born. The result is a welcoming atmosphere made of minute details, animated by a sound track composed by Neil Leonard. In Kassel, the place she has created becomes a bar.

There’s certainly no lack of interesting artworks. While in Athens the exhibition as a whole seemed slightly dispersed, and overall the connection with the city proved laborious, in Kassel the relationship with the urban and historical context has been re-established. Some of the venues offer exceptionally effective moments, such as the Neue Galerie, where the historical visitor route and the current exhibition intertwine in a web of cross-references and superimpositions, highlighting the richness of meaning in the curatorial choices.

Here one finds the dry work by Maria Eichhorn, who describes the origins of a valuable library of books acquired in 1943 by the Berliner Stadtbibliothek after they were looted from a Jewish patron of the arts in Kassel. As Szymczyk declares, the episode of Cornelius Gurlitt and the 1,500 artworks found in his apartment in Munich offers food for thought and a historical background to the work.

The vicissitudes of Gurlitt appear all the more poignant when we discover that his great-grandfather, Louis Gurlitt, born in Hamburg in 1812, was a landscape painter whose main interest was Greek antiquity. At the Neue Galerie, one discovers his watercolours portraying the Acropolis. Thus we have a reconstruction of the cycle that leads from Kassel to Athens, from Central Europe’s romantic fascination for classical antiquity to the economic squeeze of the German-led European Union, and the risk of marginalisation faced by Mediterranean countries. The artists invited to take part in Documenta tackle today’s most binding questions: scenes of war, exiles confronted with journeys of desperation, and the extreme reactions generated by this exodus; control, terrorism and deteriorating social ties.

Of course, at first it might seem as if this Documenta seeks to challenge the supremacy of the visual. But it’s a fleeting impression. Then the whole series of presented works, projects, rituals and poetic acts end up conveying a sense of great intensity, as well as an idea of art bound to its own era, and appointed with the vital role of generating reflections and new visions.

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until 17 September 2017
Documenta 14
Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, and various locations