Adam Szymczyk opened the controversial Documenta 14 in Athens, rather than its traditional seat in Kassel. Entitled “Learning from Athens,” the exhibition is full of internal contradictions. On one hand, visitors were asked to be active participants but were given little information before the opening and provided with information difficult to navigate. Documenta claimed to be about inhabiting the city and inverting the institutional structure, but the main venues – EMST, Athens Conservatoire, and The Athens School of Fine Arts – are curated in a hyper-conventional biennial style of historical exhibition plus commissions. Little information is provided about individual works, many just list the artist’s name un-ironically on a “marble” brick.
An event of contradictions
The biennial demands that art interact with activism. But the works presented at Documenta fail to make a convincing argument for art activism’s efficiency. When Szymczyk first presented his proposal in 2013, the word “crisis” was on trend. The Greek capital was in the German press on nearly a daily basis. Four years later, Athens becomes an irrelevant backdrop to new global crises and acts a reminder of the naive vision of how the crises of 2013 would eventually shape the populist and xenophobic reality of today. The location of Kassel could be just as relevant to contemporary crisis with the rise of AfD and anti-immigrant actions throughout Germany.
The move to Athens is a strong geographical statement placing the politics of Documenta against the Troika enforcement of un-democratic austerity measures on the southern states of Europe. Yet, barely any works in the biennial directly relate to what is happening in the city, and the biennial certainly had no positive impact on these political conditions. Like the media attention that faded after 2015, Documenta looks elsewhere for the new applicable crises of our time.
“The Tempest Society” by Bouchra Khalili is one of the works that directly mentioned the “Greek crisis.” The single-channel video combines historical research from activist groups in the 1970s in Paris, Greek ideas of constellations and cosmos, and the singularity of the political body in Greece after the rejection of anti-austerity vote. The curators did not commission a Greek artist to speak about the process but rather had Khalili’s own experience with immigration to France as the narrative to create a European immigrant identity. “Al Assifa” is the Arabic term for “The Tempest” and assigns this singularity of demands and identity across countries and generations. The film works in this context because the subject is exactly what people want to see; but the message and scope starts with the Greek situation and applies globally.
Kettly Noel Performance © Mathias Voelzke, via Documenta Press Office
When good intentions backfire
At the initial press conference, the curatorial team emphasized that there is no official statement of Documenta 14 because of the multiplicity of authorship. Each curator and artist entitled to their own opinions. Unlike Khalili’s concept of “Al Assifa” which brings the multiple into a singular claim, the curators of Documenta seem to want to achieve the opposite. When author, artist, and curator write their own mission, the exhibition as a whole becomes a confusing mass of claims without any official statement. A collection of vitrines about historical sound-art float without any connection to the Socialist paintings from the Museum collection in Tirana. The reader that accompanies Documenta 14 is a 708 page publication with contributions by the active members of the curatorial team as well as inserted fragments or chapters by theorists, poets, and artists. The selection of texts is valuable but does not explain the mission of Documenta or offer a solution, but simply creates a document of disparate crises. The small print on the last page: “printed in Germany” finishes destroying the illusion that the move to Athens might have been an attempt to move cultural money to Greek producers.
Located close to Khalili’s video in the Athens School of Fine Arts is the 20-minute black and white film “Glimpse” by Artur Zmijewski. The film is made after the style of SS Nazi documentation of people living in camps. Zmijewski uses the same aesthetic techniques to film families living in the Calais jungle, under the Ubahn tracks in Berlin, and at the Tempelhof encampment in Neukölln. The people being filmed look uncomfortable, confused, and they are treated like an object for study, slowly turned and inspected by the white hands of the artist. However, the intention of the film is absent in the exhibition’s mediation. Once the intention of replicating the Nazi films was explained by an invigilator, the audience is left to think whether it is worse to naively make this type of exploitative work, or to knowingly reproduce it for an unmediated context.
Athenians needing to pay full price for a ticket while accredited visitors got in for free is not the most inviting gesture
Can the local represent the global?
Documenta does well in commissioning and exhibiting artists who are directly related or involved with the conflicts they approach. And yet, it is a specific kind of artist who is able to speak in a multiplicity of aesthetic languages who is admitted into the exhibition. Not only must the artist have insight into particular struggles or conditions, but they must also be fluent in the artistic language of the Western Biennial format. Hiwa K’s concrete installation in the courtyard of the Benaki museum is a single stair leading up to an exposed bed frame providing a stage, rather than privacy. Entitled “One Room Apartment” the piece refers to the new architectural necessities that emerged in Iraqi Kurdistan after the Gulf Wars. Born in Iraq, but based in Berlin, K was initially a realist painter but no longer paints. With his new practice in film and installation K is well adapted to the traditional biennial format while offering a perspective and insight into the specific Iraqi situation.
On the other hand, repeat-Documenta participant Hans Haacke produced “We (All) Are The People” which did not go over well with residents of Athens. The poster translates the title phrase into a number of languages. It was printed 10,000 times to be plastered all over Athens in poster-sized editions. The gesture seems to play exactly into the obvious interventions that Documenta seems to encourage, with a rainbow gradient, a single phrase of unity translated in a democratic way and without making a single political demand. This begs the question: who has the right to proclaim themselves “the people?” Haacke, known for his critique of the corporate-institutional partnership while remaining a staple artist of the biennial, uses the advertising structure to make claims in a similar way that Documenta appears as a brand imposed on the city of Athens to legitimate its artistic relevance.
On the second day of the Documenta opening, a series of posters began to appear surrounding the two campuses of the Athens School of Fine Arts. Covering up the Hans Haacke intervention, new papers were instead printed with slogans such as “currently based in Athens” in Helvetica font, or “Emerging Economies” in front of an image of refugees in a raft. This anonymous intervention responds to the disconnect between the art world and people’s lived realities as well as referencing the initial suspicion with which the art students interacted with the curatorial team. One poster reads “South is the new North” with a Northern European landscape behind the letters. The landscape is a printed wallpaper with an air conditioner attached on top and an office desk in front of it. In small letters the poster says “make yourselves at home” in an ironic gesture that references the isolation of the curatorial team from Athens and the difficulty of learning from a city without interacting with it fully. What a full interaction would have been is still up for interpretation – but Athenians needing to pay full price for a ticket while accredited visitors got in for free is not the most inviting gesture. The campaign against the Haacke posters effectively made them disappear after only 2 days up in the city, which is probably the political fate of the event as a whole.
Rasheed Araeen / Kotzia Square Shamiyaana—Food for Thought: Thought for Change © Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, via Documenta Press Office
The opportunities opened up by free entrance
One work that had the most potential to successfully integrate into the Athenian context was Rasheed Araeen’s public daily lunches. The founder of the journal Third Text, has been a constant anti-racist and immigrant rights activist. His intervention for Documenta is an outdoor pavilion directly across from the Athens town serving simple food to the public. During the VIP days of Documenta this was one of the only locations where art world insiders could have sat down and mingle with the Athenian public if the venue wasn’t so segregated. During the rest of the event, the work might simply become an empty charity gesture; but at least during the opening it was the only place accessible without accreditation.
Among the many artists shown in Athens, a minority were Greek. Although the curators have promised to feature Greek artists in Kassel, few of the new commissions went to local artists. Angelo Plessas’ contribution was easily one of the most context-appropriate pieces. The installation refers to the Greek situation using local history and folklore. Known for his early works in net-art during the 2000s, Plessas makes connections between internet culture and the Oracle of Delphi. Inspired by the life of his neighbour Maria Zamanou-Mickelson who had acted as a spy for the Greek Secret Service during the German occupation, Plessas develops a documentary film and series of workshops based on traditional forms of knowledge and education. Zamanou-Mickelson’s methods of relating information lead Plessas to question the validity of institutionally taught learning which he claims, has led to the disasters of the last century. In a series of workshops conducted in Delphi, ancient knowledge is reclaimed and studied without the necessity of scientific precision but as an experiment to open and de-institutionalise knowledge. The piece manages to stay away from the tropes expected from Greek artists in Documenta while the character of Maria might be more significant than at first glance. With Documenta’s focus on “Aneducation” the knowledge of the sibyl is not one that can be imparted but one with which you are discovered and respected, however much we can really learn from Athens there is always the position of the spectator which is not transgressed in the institutional-style exhibition.
Empty promises and contradictions
Documenta 14 is composed of a number of empty promises and contradictions. The institution was not dissolved and there was not audience participation in any unusual way. The institution of Documenta does not appear to recognize its own self-referential quality and remains content as a check mark for the art world to pat itself on the back and say, “we did a good thing.” During the press conference, Szymczyk invited Syrian filmmaker Charif Kiwan to represent the Syrian television collective Abounaddara. The opening words of his talk began with the following statement: “Our collective is not supposed to participate in contemporary art exhibitions, because we are not artists, we are artisans working in a society fighting for dignity.”
The refusal to show in biennials or even identify as an artist is a strong statement claiming that while our current political climate makes Documenta demand a political imperative from art – it is unable to go far enough. The institutional format of making exhibitions has proved to have little political impact and if Szymczyk had wanted to make a difference in Athens a completely new form of working should have been reached, outside the ESMT, The Benaki Museum, the Art School, and outside the Music Conservatoir.
Documenta 14 takes place in Athens, Greece, from 8 April to 16 July 2017 and in Kassel, Germany, from 10 June to 17 September 2017