Sustainability and Scandal at Documenta 15

Documenta, the sprawling contemporary art exhibition in the German city of Kassel, marks more than just an update to the anthology of the art world’s best and brightest. Whereas events like Art Basel and the Venice Biennale have established themselves as forums for the coronation of contemporary taste, Documenta, which only takes place once every five years, sets its sights beyond the present. It is widely considered a bellwether of the future of art, a moment when the new and still uncertain forms begin to take shape. 

That future, it turns out, is a messy one. Documenta 15, which runs from June 18 to September 25, was curated by the Jakarta-based contemporary art collective ruangrupa. This is the first time that the director role has been given to a collective and also the first time that non-curators have been responsible for the organization and presentation of the works. Ruangrupa opted for a decentralized approach to curating the event. They selected several dozen art groups from around the world, and each of these groups was given a budget and encouraged to invite further artists and collectives. The resulting exhibition is a sprawling hydra of associatiative bonds that registers like something out of a Borges story – labyrinthine, fractal, seething with life. 

The conceptual framework for this structure is the “lumbung”, an Indonesian term for a collective barn in which grains are stored and allocated for communal purposes. The lumbung, according to the Documenta website, “is anchored in the local and based on values such as humor, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration”. There are a few different ways to draw a metaphor around this, but trying to force it into a conceptual model would miss another one of exhibition’s operating tenants, which is that art-speaky-ness and theory are less important than action in practice – building community, establishing lasting relationships between individuals, groups, and the ecosystems they exist in.

Although no set figure has been made available to the public, the number of artists involved in Documenta 15 is estimated to be around fifteen-hundred. Kassel itself has been transformed. There’s a skateboard ramp in the Documenta Halle built by the Thai Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture. There’s the “Vietnamese Immigrating Garden,” a semi-legal garden of Vietnamese plants grown by the Nha San Collective. The entrance to the entrance hall, a long dark tunnel constructed by the Wajukuu Art Project, is considered something of a bane of the federal government’s regulations on health and safety. 

One of the conceptual nodes of the exhibition is sustainability, a term still most often used in environmental contexts but which has also taken hold in postcolonial discourse, mainly to formulate questions about how to approach development (of territory, human relationships, knowledge) without exhausting resources. Some works focus explicitly on land usage. For example, Chengdu-based artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jinajun installed a tent made of woven yak hair and other fabrics, within which viewers can explore other components of their project, including workshops, presentations, and videos about the ecology of water use in agricultural areas in China. Nguyễn Trinh Thi, a Hanoi-based filmmaker and artist, has installed clusters of chili plants in the Rondell, which recall the flora of the areas in Vietnam that hosted detention camps between the 1960s and 1970s. Others focus on the expropriative relationships between traditional core and periphery nations, such as Nairobi’s The Nest Collective, which has placed large piles of clothes in front of the Orangerie that resemble a dump site, a reminder of the waste disposal crisis that has become part of everyday life for many Kenyan citizens.

The decision to install ruangrupa at the helm of Documenta 15 was hailed as a major step towards the decolonization of Germany’s flagship art event. Not only were a diverse group of artists being represented at the exhibition, but the levers of power in the curation and organization were being handed over as well. This itself can be understood as another dimension of sustainability – the fostering of relationships based on mutual benefit rather than the extraction of skills or resources. As is becoming something of its own tradition in Germany, it didn’t take long for this well-intentioned move to kick up a shit-storm of controversy that leaves little doubt about how very far the country remains from an enlightened stance on the legacies of racialized expropriation and violence. 

Even before the exhibition opened, ruangrupa came under fire from German media and a number of politicians for its decision to include the group The Question of Funding, and for the organizers’ support of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel) movement, which the Bundestag has labeled as antisemitic. Certain talking heads suggested that, because some members of ruagrupa come from muslim backgrounds, that they might not be adequately calibrated to the German sensitivity around antisemitism. The exhibition space allocated to The Question of Funding was broken into and vandalized with graffiti. A perhaps more compelling critique is that no Israeli artists were included in the show, which, given the decentralized nature of the invitation structure, feels like both nobody’s responsibility and everyone’s.

Despite all the barb-trading, Documenta 15 kicked off to a general sense of ellubliation. It is big and complicated and untidy, the works are challenging, they defy easy categorization into intellectual or political silos, the very structure of the exhibition bucks attempts to try to make complete sense of all the different offerings on hand. A number of critics have pointed out that this edition of Documenta deemphasizes the aesthetic quality of works in favor of showcasing their social and economic function. For some, this is further proof that politicization has become endemic in the art world, that people don’t care about virtue or genius any more. For others, it’s a sign that the great artistic revolutions of the 21st Century may in fact be inseparable from tangible actions against capitalism, against racialization, against the colonial and the patriarchal. 

Obviously, the image should not have been displayed, and never should have been created. Ruangrupa explained that it did not do a thorough review of all the artworks displayed out of respect for the creative freedom of the artists invited to participate, although they have now been instructed to comb through the remaining pieces to identify any possible further antisemitic representations. A number of critics have placed the blame for the image on the decentralized structure of the exhibition, which by its very nature resists the sort of systematic review that is now being demanded. 

Nobody has come out of this looking particularly good, which is a shame, because an enormous amount of energy and intelligence has been ignored in the process. Among the many bright points that risk being overshadowed are the sustainability practices that were characteristic of many of the contributions to the exhibition. Works that interact directly with the geographies of historically marginalized groups, that are structured around preindustrial production techniques, and that aim to cultivate lasting relationships between disparate groups chart a new course for the highest echelons of the art world. Sustainability, in this version of the future, means that it isn’t sufficient to simply represent diverse people and ideas, and that these groups need to be actively integrated into the economic and political dimensions of the process of representation. Whether Documenta constitutes a step towards or away from this vision remains to be seen.