KASSEL, Germany – A piano concerto emerges from the walls of a mid-century train station. A giant stuffed dog’s head dwarfs passers-by. A circle of young men in shorts and cotton socks march behind a woman in a high black ponytail, imitating her energetic movements around a grassy square. A Madonna made of a human skeleton smiles from the altar of a church, a gray plastic doll clutched at the ribs.
To classify – or quantify – the dizzying sensory and conceptual experience of documenta’s fifteenth summer in Kassel, Germany, requires a mind as open as the eyes. No individual artist is lionized; few works by artists of European origin are exhibited at all. Bursting with a decolonialist fervor comparable to this year’s Berlin Biennale, documenta fifteen (D15) loudly – and proudly – eschews Western modes of presentation, curation and imminent commodification. Organized by the Jakarta artist collective, ruangrupa, and involving over a thousand participants, D15 exalts the collective in both practice and presentation, turning the traditional view of European art inside out.
Unsurprisingly, so many voices vibrating in unison also mean the cacophony – the “DIY chaos” and controversy which critics have already duly covered – from the removal of an anti-Semitic caricature in the epic. People’s Justice installation by the artistic collective Taring Padi with the resignation of the director of documents Sabine Schormann and the consultant Meron Mendel, head of the Anne Frank Educational Institute in Frankfurt. During my mid-June walk through Friedrichsplatz, People’s Justice also, among her hundreds of cardboard figures, a cutout of a woman with bright green hair that read: “All Lives Matter” [sic]seemingly oblivious to the slogan’s conservative connotations for the United States.
As disorienting as this particular encounter felt, the D15’s multivalent timbre proved at odds with my American expectations in all sorts of sublimely poignant ways—ways often in tension with the text-heavy didacticism that dominated several key installations. When I was explicitly instructed to interpret the work as anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-patriarchal, I found my sensory and intellectual faculties congealed. The most fruitful artistic disruptions instead disrupt their environments, subtly intervening in traditional German institutions or historical monuments, often off the beaten path or in spaces not built for art or performance: a factory in industrial Bettenhausen, for example, or in the dark, dark. Rondell, a 16th-century defensive tower that once anchored the city’s fortifications. Sculptures, workshops and site-specific installations covering the center of Kassel as well as its suburbs and industrial districts, almost exclusively by artists from the Global South, highlighted – and indeed – defined – the documentary experience, satisfying and disturbing in equal measure.
On the first night of my visit, a hypnotic concert by Black Quantum Futurism, a Philadelphia-based practice formed by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, echoed off the Fulda River and its bridges, filled with sunset spectators. Combining Afrofuturist spoken word with the jazz instrumentals of Irreversible Entanglements, who played on the shore above, Ayewa and Phillips performed Check out the night service in honor of June. Standing next to Phillips on “The Clepsydra Stage” (2022), a floating formation constructed of two circular clocks that move with the current, Ayewa declared: “To wait in the water … to submerge the Master’s clock, is a revolutionary act within a revolutionary. the act of escape.”
About two kilometers east of this performance site, in Bettenhausen, the Hübner Areal production plant lies in an industrial space with more than a few buildings that look condemned or long uninhabited. At the front of the former factory, a tall vertical screen plays the video installation Smashing Monuments (2022) by Sebastián Díaz Morales, in which ruangrupa members verbally address giant statues commemorating Jakarta’s historical figures and events. As the camera tracks each speaker’s shoes, we only get a clue about that person’s gender and age. In one video, a 30-year-old man holds his infant daughter and prays to a monument for guidance; in another, a 20-year-old woman expresses ambivalence about her national identity.
At Saint Kunigundis, a 1927 building tucked behind a stone wall to the east, a traditional Roman Catholic church has been repurposed to dramatic effect by Haitian artist groups Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale, its interiors and grounds filled with mixed sculptures composed of found materials and urban waste. Beneath the 13th station of the cross carved into the nave of the chapel hangs a framed photo of three nude black women stoically holding a large snake. Lighted spinning plastic totems flank the church porch filled with votive candles. Skeletal remains anthropomorphic statues scaffolding constructed from corroded metal, nails and iridescent CDs. The signage clarifies that, in Haitian culture, the use of human bones as an art medium is not considered offensive. Under the arched arches of St. Kunigundis, the spectacle takes your breath away.
Across the Walter-Lübcke Bridge, in a room once used for executions, Rondell houses a light and sound installation by Hanoi-based filmmaker and video artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi. Entering slowly into the narrow, gauzy corridor—its stone ceiling rolled to prevent damage—visitors can barely see the beanbags in the center of the balcony, below which chili plants are arranged to cast a vast forest of shadow on the turret walls. Moving in sync with the quiet sounds of the sáo ôi flute, an indigenous musical instrument from northern Vietnam, shadows appear and overlap the smallest list of plant life. A historic torture site becomes a surprising space of humility and contemplation.
Up the Fulda at Grimmwelt Kassel, a museum dedicated to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a two-channel animated video installation by Trinidad and Tobago-based collective Alice Yard redefines the brothers’ legacy, uncannily exposing the alienating effects of classical culture of Disney princesses. Set behind a children’s area complete with a gingerbread house and enchanted forest, Forever a Princess chronicles the adventures of a ganges swan cycling through its warped forests. Curiously approaching the magical portals in her little crown, the swan encounters unexpected technicolor renderings of swirling dresses and animals by people like Cinderella AND Snow White. When the gilded doors for both AladdinThe Sultan’s Palace and Beauty and the BeastHer castle crashing down in her face, the swan desperately searches for other signifiers of “princess”—deluded by the fantasy that all can aspire to royalty.
Equally hidden, and even more incriminating to imperialist power, is Australian Aboriginal artist Richard Bell’s balloon sculpture outside the basement toilets of the grand Fridericianum museum, the main site of documenta since 1955. A bouquet of five mylar balloons in heart shape and a helium balloon float above a small porcelain urinal placed below the stairs, while a scattering of latex balloons crinkle below. What exactly are we looking at? “Western Art” (2020–22), apparently, in which Bell pays cheeky homage to Marcel Duchamp’s cooking of 1917. Should we clumsily recycle the canon, as Bell seems to suggest, or is it time to finally rinse it off? In the spirit of ruangrupa’s aim to “create a globally oriented, collaborative and interdisciplinary arts and culture platform”, the latter extreme may not be necessary. Deflating Western egos, on the other hand? Absolutely crucial.
Documents 15 continues at various venues in Kassel, Germany, through September 25. It is curated by ruangrupa.
