The Elephant is Bigger than the Room: Documenta Trouble and Curatorial Responsibility

Documenta 15’s thousand collective voices challenged curation and exhibition-making as we know it; the show even advocated for curators ‘to go home.’ Yet when a drama happens, who is in fact in charge? What is the irreducible DNA of curation? How does this role imply a tension between hegemony and dissidence? And how, in the light of the damage being done, do we employ a necessary, multidirectional reading and accountability that does not decouple one oppression from the other, but rather uses an intersectional lens in order to start a real discussion?

“This exhibition is going to be a surprise for you, as much as it is for us,” said ruangrupa at the press conference of Documenta 15. Back then and in the preview days that followed, this seemed like a delightful promise of an anti-hegemonic, plurivocal perennial, where power, resources, and invitations are disseminated and decentered. Instead of the art world as a western invention guarded by gate-keeping curators, many art worlds unfolded. Instead of solely seeing artworks as final arrival points of an artistic process, we were invited into messy and scenic studios, workshops, archives, classrooms, playgrounds, churches, and communal spaces, where we witnessed and experienced art which is not an object but a language of sorts. We saw art that brought people together under the horizon of the same values, that became a means of cross-cultural translation, of sharing the thrill and hardship of what is often lost in the process. Most of the invited collectives stemmed from the Global South, and a walk through Documenta 15 revealed a theatre of contexts, a realm seen from so many, non-western points of view, some of them more welcoming or activated than others. It felt honest, it didn’t preach, and it went beyond a happy picture of people working together in perfect harmony.

In those preview days (why was there even a preview? Why give special access to the professionals? Shouldn’t those “VIP days” be abolished altogether given ruangrupa’s credo?) we laughed, we socialised, we partook, we carried honest smiles on our faces, we made spontaneous picnics outside the venues, and we also sang to a karaoke projected on the back wall of Fridericianum. The concept of Lumbung (stemming from the Indonesian term for “a collectively governed rice-barn, where the gathered harvest is stored for the common good of the community”) became contagious for many of us. We also felt the horizontal spatiality of this exhibition, with endless cushions, mattresses, chaise longues, sofas, and pillows, where apparently many art critics were sleeping. There were also many pop-up auditoriums, where people were supposed to talk to each other. Nevertheless I was missing what in an old-school museum language is called a “discursive program,” a curated place of conversations to share and fathom what we were going through. Healing and kindness were floating in the air overall. Often the feeling of victimhood was replaced by affirmation, self-righteousness by generosity, and competing identities by the necessity of bordering each other.

Documenta 15, or rather Lumbung One as ruangrupa puts it, showed a possible direction for the exhibitions and museums of the future. It didn’t only “display” art but celebrated it as a language made of conviviality, a way of overcoming isolation or distress, an act of collective intelligence, married with many other art genres. There were 1500 artists in this endeavour, and even more collaborators. In some sense, there, “everyone is an artist”. And occasionally there were also artworks, it was even full of artworks, yet they were not fetishized, they were simply one of the outcomes of artistic and activistic drive. “Some might harrumph that Documenta 15 is relational aesthetics gone mad.” – wrote Adrian Searle in the Guardian. Well, yes and no. Yes because at its centre was art as a basic human need of an encounter and its social context, and no because there was still so much more substance here, so many more situated knowledges, so much a question of necessity. Sadly, there was no presence of collectives from Ukraine or Russia, for whom, at the moment, art is more than ever a way of overcoming isolation, a grammar of sanity or a mode of surviving. There were almost no Namibian artists nor Israeli-Jewish artists–positions so entangled with German history (an Israeli-Jewish artist is in fact part of one of the collectives and made an anonymous statement about it). Generally, there was almost no sign of any conflict, it almost felt too consensual and harmonious, there was no indication of the potential antisemitism so anticipated by some. It was almost as if something had to happen.

As I was walking around with my critical girlfriends (critical friend is a term stemming from the 70th critical pedagogy and has recently entered an art grant system in the UK, where, in a society becoming more and more narcissistic, you can hire someone to deliver the truth), I was wondering what this exhibition does to the profession of curating and the curatorial, and how the concept of criteria and judgement needs to be questioned. And then we stumbled onto a manifesto inside the rooms of INSTAR, an Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt initiated in Havana by Tania Bruguera. A paper by Cuban artist Sandra Ceballos hung on the wall spoke to us: “Curadores, Go Home”. It told us that we who call ourselves curators “emit rulings with efficient coherence, annihilate the lucidity and the elegance of the imperfect, the paroxysm, the tolerance, the spontaneity and the anarchism.” We were called irresponsible selectors who discriminate and were informed that the show on view was not curated by any specialist, art critic or curator: “it has only been resolved – with prurient will and no pathological restraint – by the participating artists themselves. The number of artists was limited only by the space itself.”

OK, sure, I understand. Somehow deep inside me I knew it was coming. I even empathise with some of those words and appreciate that this exhibition pushes many of us to think about where we will go from now. How do we overcome, dismantle and change the patterns of the power of selection disguised as care, the authority of judgement, the asymmetry of many relations in the art world and the extractive curatorial attitudes to many artists. In French a curator is “la/le commissaire” like a “commissaire de police” – the police, except that instead of guarding the general order she/he patrols the borders of what is “good art”. Fellow thinker and friend Nora Sternfeld and I amused ourselves some years ago with defining a curator as someone who is a policeman and an activist at the same time – who is deliberately in a conundrum of representing hegemony and needs to assume it, while often striving to be anti-hegemonic. Someone who creates forms and support structures, while introducing subversion, who embodies the electrifying impossibility of policing and being dissident at the same time. Following the political theorist Oliver Marchart and his idea that the curatorial function is an organic intellectual practice, we saw curators, on one hand as functionaries of a neoliberal cultural field, as facilitators and managers, and on the other hand as activists, educators, public intellectuals or researchers.We talked about it with Nora ten years ago, and in the meantime, she became a documenta professor, co-edited a fundamental reader on curating as anti-racist practice and then moved on to teach in Hamburg. Time passes yet this curatorial aporia unchangeably holds ground.

So what now? What do we do with this angry call addressed to so many of us who flocked to Kassel during the opening days? We all know those curators who never have time for artists, who make sure that artists are at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy, who forget that our profession exists in the first place because art exists, and that our compass should be, in the words of Maria Lind, art-centric. Yet the proposition to let only the space determine the number of artists is not a solution either. We need a sublimation process, connections, interdependencies, narrations, and forms to coexist – we need a larger conversation to go on. We can rewind, but we should not go back to zero. Claire Bishop after visiting Kassel joked: “I think this show actually needs a curator.”

Then came Sunday and the art world (only one of the art worlds, since the other half was in Basel and didn’t bother to come to Kassel) went home and the critics sat at their laptops writing their papers. And that very weekend it happened: the banner by the collective Taring Padi's People's Justice was uncovered in the very center of the main square of Friedrichsplatz. There could not be a more central, more visible, more noticeable location. And there it was, an antisemitic caricature in the most important German art exhibition, full on, exposed. It occurred among the colorful figures of an Indonesian paper theatre, which had been charming us on the same field for a few days. The banner contained other discriminating stereotypes, too, that have been less noticed. What happened? An act manqué, accidentally on purpose, unconsciously deliberate, a psychoanalytic desire, Ahmedian killjoy, Freudian slip. The fact is, it was there, for the general audience to see for some hours, before it was arrested and hidden behind a black curtain and eventually dismantled.

Panic and hysteria in the German ministry of culture.

Now, what about less asymmetrical forms of curating in this new constellation?

In some respects, with this Documenta I was reminded of the 7th Berlin Biennale where I worked as associate curator to Artur Żmijewski, back in 2012. One of our projects was that of a Czech artist Martin Zet, who proposed to withdraw a controversial book from circulation. He wanted to call its readers to donate their copies of the book that he would collect and use to make an installation. Then one day a well-known intellectual commented on public radio, creating an image in people’s heads: “It reminds me of the shameful book burning.” And so it went, the snowball effect of a collective fear that Żmijewski was going to burn books in the middle of Berlin in 2012 (which was not the intention of Zet, yet at some point, he said he almost felt pushed into it – the phantasmatic pressure of a collective paranoia so big), it almost seemed unstoppable.

Żmijewski and ruangrupa are worlds apart, the first being a radical artist who looks how to stage conflict, and the second being a collective who is “looking for new friends,” or similar minded people, via art in the spirit of coexistence and decoloniality. There is however one similarity between the curation of the malevolent artist from Warsaw and that of do-gooders from Jakarta – both are the sort of curators who “went home,” who refrained from the sublimation of art into the curatorial. Surprised? Why exactly? Wasn’t Żmijewski, as curator of the Berlin Biennale, doing exactly what he does as an artist, being challenging, provoking disagreements, but staying a side observer while letting others deal with it? Didn’t ruangrupa have enough courage to “just be themselves,” opening up a process of an on-going conversation and inviting more people on board? “We are not interested in control” – another of their statements at the press conference, a way of saying that everything was cemented with trust. The good vibes of this Documenta come from the fact that, in one of the biggest art events on the planet, ruangrupa precisely dared to be themselves, not to bend to the expectations, not to make a well-measured exhibition in a white cube, but rather to make a gigantic living room full of militant voices and to switch off the judgement button, ruangrupa also dared to foreground a perspective which is Global-South-centric. In fact they were invited for this reason. But the truth is: when this world view is delivered and it means one from which Ukraine is not visible, and an antisemitic caricature slips in, because coloniality and oppression has many other faces, they come back as “boomerang effect” – and this is too much to bear in German and European context. Just as in the 7th Berlin Biennale: it’s hard to live with the real consequences of one’s own invitation. Surprised, yes, but also not really.

And so in that spectacle of decentralisation the impossible happened, a line was crossed, the damage was made.

So as much as we, curators, need to go home in some sense, we also need to ask ourselves what is the bare minimum for curation? What is its irreducible DNA? Curation can take many forms, all shapes if you will, starting from expanding ideas of exhibition making, but also of public programing, dramaturgy, advocacy, hospitality, facilitation, mediation, collectivity, and more. It can come in all constellations, and it can have all genders, or triangles and patchworks. I believe, however, that its sole irreducible aspects are – firstly that of responsibility, even if it is multidirectional, and secondly that of some sort of visual literacy.

That responsibility and visual literacy should be based, in both an unspoken and spoken manner, on some form of common values, of curatorial ethics which states what would be “crossing the line” – such as no room for xenophobia or hate speech. You need such a system “even if the relations of trust make you question it,” wrote Mohammad Salemy in an article for Arts of the Working Class. Paradoxically, Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi in his horizontal newspaper and tags on the columns of Fridericianum, repeated the phrase “ability responsibility” over and over, as if that emotion was in the air. Because if a curator doesn’t take responsibility for visual literacy, for what images mean and how they can be read in a given context, which performative effect they can produce, then someone else from the team will have to take it, be it a managing director, an assistant or even an intern. Curators need to assume that they are inevitably at the juncture of police and politics, bureaucracy and activism. “The question is now what to do with this function in a moment of conflict. Should we – as curators – use it to emphasise struggles, to silence them? And if we are placed at the intersection of reproducing power on the one hand and reclaiming radical change on the other, on which side are we on?” – asked Nora Sternfeld.

“It is no longer possible for a curator simply to display works to “start a conversation” – said another artist-friend, Lisa Tan. “There is so much to anticipate these days: artists boycotting, right-wing capture, media involvement, situated knowledges, and and and.”

The display of this antisemitic (but also racist, gynophobic and homophobic) banner, which itself was an effect of a deliberate eschewing of the authorship, shows the limits of trust. But it could also be used as a tool of “deep learning and unlearning.” What followed was a dismal prosecutorial climate from the German authorities and a lot of the press – a gesture of bureaucracy attempting to overpower Documenta’s million diverse voices, the resignation of the director and the reporting of ruangrupa at Bundestag. An announced central management from Berlin and a censoring investigation of all artworks under the presumed antisemitic reading are on the way. A huge possible backlash hangs in the air. This response revealed so much trauma on many ends. The memory work in Germany when it comes to its shameful past is poignant compared to so many other countries that are obsessed with history without examining it critically. And now this work has been probed. Huge predicament. But as psychoanalysts say: each crisis could be a new beginning. Could it?

The US-American scholar Michel Rothberg in his book Multidirectional Memory asks how we can relate the histories of victimisation of different social groups? How can we avoid a situation where one commemoration becomes a denial of another and how can we think of collective memory from a multidirectional perspective. “Multidirectional” has become a buzz word, yet it holds ground in that complex conundrum. Rothberg also wrote about the Documenta scandal, referring to the necessary act of cross-referencing:

Both the syncretic formal features of the antisemitic imagery and the way they suggest a longer history of cultural and political exchange between Europe and Southeast Asia ought to inspire a more multidirectional consideration of intersecting colonial, racial, and religious ideologies. (...) The case of Taring Padi suggests that we need to unlearn our certainty, our moral superiority, and our presumed innocence in order to learn anew about the entangled histories that implicate us in the larger dynamics of race, antisemitism, colonialism, and genocide—histories that have made us all who we are. Perhaps those processes of learning and unlearning could represent a small, but necessary step toward a true people’s justice.

In a panel organised by the Documenta board a few days after the scandal, on 29.06.2022, a similar, intersectional and inspiring reading was proposed by an Indian-German scholar Nikita Dhawan, who warned against dismissing postcolonial studies as antisemitic. She quoted Edward Said saying that when he was writing the history of orientalism, he was in fact secretly writing the history of antisemitism. Those narrations cannot be read apart.

Some years ago, together with my students, I analysed various boycotts of different art biennales, which we summed up in the publication I Can’t Work like This. We have learned that one has to continue, but not continue undisturbed. One could see a crisis as a moment when everyone involved rethinks themselves, when everyone feels disturbed, hurt and touched by what happened. It is painful, but necessary and potentially healing. And there are different paths from there. If we take decolonization seriously, then the sensitivity to antisemitism would need to be seen in relation to all other anti-racist struggles and forms of othering, welcoming a nuanced multidirectional reading in a German post-migrant society where different necessary narrations could meet: Jewish artists who support the Palestinian cause, Turkish-German diasporic accounts, the dramatic history of a German suppressed genocide in Nambia, among others. This instead of another possible pessimistic scenario which the journalist of the daily TAZ called "Waterloo of the postcolonials”. ruangrupa took the responsibility and apologised on many occasions. This seems not enough. It seems there is also a hegemony of affects.

Instead of schooling the various and diverse schools from the Global South, a discursive lumbung could now take place, co-initiated by many local voices, where fear could be replaced by real discussion, taking into account the cultural translation, the various traumas and the sensitivity towards context. It will always get messy, yet there is no other way out. Sadly, just like in another drawing by Perjovschi, the debate about the exhibition was happening predominantly outside it. The most vocal were the critics and the observers. One would wish to hear more from the artists, from the various “mini-majelis,” the lumbung cells of the decentralised body, “assemblies meant for passing forwards knowledge and experience” – as the Documenta handbook tells us. Now or even later (the consequences of Documenta 15 will live on) would be a time to share and talk to each other beyond joy of collaboration, to hear both local and non-local voices, to practise the conversational side of lumbung. Now would be a moment to see the advisory board act and organise some debates on the ground in complex and nuanced ways, beyond their Facebook feeds.

I visited Documenta 15 again at the end of August. And I was happy to find myself in what one of the members of ruangrupa, Indra Ameng, called a “parallel reality”. One arrives fed with the harshness of the public debate, a bit scared. Instead, on the ground, I encountered the dynamic everyday life of the exhibition: long queues, multiple guided tours bumping into each other, various tea ceremonies, never-ending public program of INSTAR, the critical introductions by the technicians, artistic team running around, the on-going drawing sessions, many colleagues hanging out with their families or pets just on a random day. Lumbung didn’t give up, Hito Steryl’s withdrawal didn’t cancel the show, the place felt still very big-hearted and thriving, while apparently a scientific committee was examining the works.

And even if I would have wished for lumbungs to shine when the crises hit, more access to how certain installations have been negotiated (for exemple how did Ghetto Biennale from Haiti with its vodou practice inscribed itself into the functioning church of St. Kunigundis), and even if I believe in the need for more multidirectional responsibility by the non-curators, the discussion will keep going elsewhere and in other ways. Overall I was impressed by ruangrupa’s resilience, by how they kept going despite the ostracism and over-simplifications. In a recent, slightly patronising interview, Süddeutsche Zeitung asked about their stamina and they answered with the words of Toni Morrison: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and you spend twenty years proving that you do. (…) None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

July-August 2022

Thank you for lumbunging together: Marta Czyż, Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Emilie Houdent, Maria Lind, Nina Möntmann, Nataša Petresin-Bachelez, Sinziana Ravini, Elena Sorokina, Nora Sternfeld, Lisa Tan, and many others.