- documenta
Together with documenta fifteen artist Dan Perjovschi, the cooperation partners Hessen Kassel Heritage and documenta archiv have refurbished and reopened the room dedicated to the latest edition of documenta in an exhibition entitled about: documenta hosted in the Neue Galerie in Kassel.
For the new exhibition display, Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi could now be won to design a wall. With his critical and yet humorous stenographs on the crises and conflicts of our time, Perjovschi has created one of the central artistic interventions of documenta fifteen on the columns of the portico of the Fridericianum, with his work Generosity, Regeneration, Transparency, Independence, Suffcieny, Local Anchor and most of all Humor (2022).
Curated by the Indonesian artists' collective ruangrupa, documenta fifteen (2022) set in motion a continuing debate about artistic freedom, its limits, and group-specific discrimination such as anti-Semitism and racism in art. In the wake of the accusations of anti-Semitism, central artistic concerns of the exhibition, such as the communal sharing of resources or the notion of social and ecological sustainability, shifted into the background. The presentation in the Neue Galerie now spotlights the past exhibition summer by way of selected artistic projects at documenta fifteen.
The permanent exhibition about: documenta in the Neue Galerie provides an overview of some 70 years of documenta history. What began in 1955 with the first documenta under difficult conditions in the provisionally restored Fridericianum in Kassel, destroyed during the war, grew under founder Arnold Bode and subsequent artistic directors into one of the largest art events worldwide. The presentation in the Neue Galerie, now expanded to include the most recent documenta edition, takes visitors on a journey through the show's history via key artworks, scenographies, models, films, images, and documents, which can always be read as a seismogram of artistic, social, and political events of the day.
The new presentation was curated by Dorothee Gerkens (Director Neue Galerie), Birgitta Coers (Director documenta archiv), Julius Lehmann (Research Associate documenta archiv), and Harald Kimpel (freelance author and art historian).
The exhibition about: documenta opened in November 2019 as a cooperation between Hessen Kassel Heritage and documenta archiv.
About the documenta archiv
The documenta archiv was founded in 1961 by Arnold Bode, the initiator of the Kassel exhibition venture, with the task of providing the artistic directors of the world's most important art event with a memorizing institution. Today, under the auspices of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the documenta archiv is dedicated to the collection, documentation and academic research of texts, images and objects on modern and contemporary art. One of the focal points is the history of the documenta exhibitions held since 1955, the changing curatorial practices, their social interconnections and institutional conditions. In addition to its functions within the documenta and Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the documenta archiv is concerned with documentary strategies in contemporary art and aspects of media history. The documenta archiv is a member of the Arbeitskreis selbstständiger Kultur-Institute e.V. (AsKI) and initiates research and exhibition projects along its own holdings in cooperation with regional, national and international scholarly and cultural institutions.