dOCUMENTA (13)

For the second time since 1997, documenta 2012 was directed by a woman. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who gathered around her an advisory circle of "agents" from around the world, most notably the Spaniard Chus Martínez, confused the press in the run-up with non-concept, eco-feminism, dog calendars, an absurdly hard-to-remember title The dance was very frenetic, brisk, rattling, ringing, rolling, twisted, and lasted a long time, as well as the announcement of a parallel exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Following the platforms of documenta 11, documenta 13 went one step further by not only organizing events outside Kassel in the run-up to the exhibition, but for the first time also part of the exhibition itself during its duration. However, another location was initially important for the concept: the former Benedictine monastery Breitenau outside Kassel, which had housed a labor and concentration camp under the National Socialists and later a girls' educational home and a psychiatric institution.

Between these two locations, Kassel/Breitenau and Kabul/Bamiyan, documenta 13 established a main motif that in turn tied in with the original idea of documenta: "Collapse and Recovery" - in other words, the healing of war trauma through art. Many artists (all of whom had visited Kassel and Breitenau beforehand, some also Kabul and Bamiyan) referred to these places in the almost exclusively newly produced works - such as Omer Fast, Mariam Ghani, Goshka Macuga, Michael Rakowitz and Clemens von Wedemeyer. Workshops were also held in Kabul and Bamiyan, the results of which were incorporated into an exhibition of Afghan artists in Kassel.

While the exhibition in Kabul was seen by 27,000 visitors, the events in Cairo/Alexandria and Banff were largely closed to the public. Christov-Bakargiev associated these four locations with further states of existence that oscillated between them and became programmatic for documenta 13: On Stage (Kassel), Under Siege (Kabul), Hope and Revolt (Cairo and Alexandria) and Retreat (Banff).

The structures were also broken up in terms of time: documenta 13 officially began back in May 2010 with the erection of Giuseppe Penone's Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone) (2003/2008/2010), a bronze tree with an erratic boulder in its crown in the Karlsaue. This was a reference to Christov-Bakargiev's own roots in Arte Povera. The motif of planting trees, closely associated with documenta since Beuys, reappeared in other moments of the exhibition in the works of Korbinian Aigner and Jimmie Durham. Last but not least, anti-anthropocentrism was another important theme of documenta 13: seeds, apples and dogs were just as much a part of it as people and art.

Spread over a large number of locations, including not only the traditional institutions such as the Fridericianum, documenta-Halle and Neue Galerie, but also museums with their own collections such as the Natural History Museum in the Ottoneum, the Astronomical Cabinet in the Orangery and the Brothers Grimm Museum as well as the two wings of the former main railway station and the entire Karlsaue (equipped with temporary prefabricated houses), documenta 13 was almost impossible to manage in just a few days.

In addition, there was an exuberant program of events and films as well as a number of permanent performative "animated" works of art. The 12,500 season tickets sold are proof of the great response from the local public. A special feature of documenta 13's "Perhaps mediation and other programs" were the "Worldly Companions" - citizens of Kassel with different backgrounds who, after completing a training course, passed on their individual knowledge about documenta 13 to visitors in so-called "d-Tours".

With almost 905,000 visitors, visitor records were once again broken. However, long queues, which made it almost impossible to visit some of the exhibition venues towards the end of the documenta's run, raised doubts as to whether it would still make sense or even be possible to attract more visitors to Kassel.