Documenta 16: Clean up and think about the future

Usually, the selection committee of the documenta does not play a major role. She enjoys a certain prominence, yes, but has done her job mostly silently in the past and determined the future curators of the important mega show. Everything is different this time; this time countless eyes rest on painter and theorist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Shanghai-based curator Gong Yan, Mumbai-based Ranjit Hoskoté, Simon Njami, María Inés Rodríguez and Kathrin Rhomberg, who, among other things, directed the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Because the new team shouldn’t just think about the future of Documenta 16 in 20026. It should also clean up behind itself.

It didn’t do the damage caused last year by the monumental work of the Indonesian artist collective Taring Padi with its anti-Semitic motifs. But the mere thought that the coming Documenta could be realized independently of that scandal, because there are five years between them, would be insane. On the contrary, everything will probably be washed up again when the next major cultural event called Documenta is due in Kassel in 2027.

In addition to Taring Padi’s disappointingly lax handling of the allegations, the communication from the organizers was catastrophic last year. First there was collective silence, then the general director of the documenta, Sabine Schormann, went into defense mode with contradictory allegations. Apparently that shouldn’t be repeated, this time more transparency counts “We have been able to recruit six outstanding experts from all over the world who, with their different artistic, curatorial and cultural-theoretical backgrounds as well as personalities, together stand for modernity, internationality and diversity of the Documenta,” says the statement by Kassel’s Lord Mayor Christian Geselle and the Hessian Minister for Science and Art, Angela Dorn, who both chair the Supervisory Board.

Now it’s a matter of working through the “mistakes on the subject of anti-Semitism” at Documenta 15, which the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa is responsible for. The fact that with Ruangrupa the curators of the previous show were not involved in the selection process is explicitly mentioned. It is a start that will hopefully be followed by further debates and discourses, by the beginning of 2024 at the latest the responsible curators of the next documenta will be determined. Silence was yesterday: This time public would be the better strategy.

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