Learning from Athens
- Artistic Direction
Adam Szymczyk
- Venues Athens
Athens Conservatory (Odeion); Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA); National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST); Benaki Museum-Annex Pireos Street; Museum of Islamic Art and Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika Gallery; Athens Megaron Concert Hall; Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municipal Art Center and Museum of Democratic Resistance against the Dictatorship; National Archaeological Museum; Epigraphic Museum and 36 other locations and public spaces in Athens and Piraeus.
- Visitors Athens
339.000
- Visitors Kassel
891.500
- Venues Kassel
Former underground railroad station (Kulturbahnhof); Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost); Fridericianum; documenta Halle; Neue Galerie; Palais Bellevue; Westpavillon (Orangerie); Naturkundemuseum in Ottoneum; Grimmwelt; Museum für Sepulkralkultur; Hessisches Landesmuseum; Stadtmuseum Kassel; Gießhaus (University of Kassel); Gottschalk-Halle (University of Kassel); Kulturzentrum Schlachthof; Nordstadtpark; Henschel-Hallen and 18 other locations and public places in Kassel.
- Artists
163
- Historical positions
103
- Budget
47,300,000 euros incl. Athens
- Website
- documenta14.de
- Evaluation
- Download as PDF
April 8 to July 16 in Athens and
June 10 to September 17 in Kassel
documenta 14 had taken up the cause of decentralizing and decolonizing the Northwestern canon. In October 2014, artistic director Adam Szymczyk announced his concept, on the basis of which he had been selected by the selection committee almost a year earlier. It envisaged the fourteenth documenta taking place in equal parts in Kassel and Athens under the motto "Learning from Athens" – with the exhibition in Athens opening two months before Kassel and both having a duration of 100 days each.
All participating artists were to exhibit at both venues, although not necessarily with the same works. The announcement sparked fierce controversy. In Kassel, some parties feared that documenta, which is also a serious economic factor, could become a traveling exhibition. The announcement of the major event from Germany was not only met with positive feedback in Athens, which was first severely affected by the financial crisis and then by taking in a large number of refugees. Among other things, documenta was accused of neo-colonial behavior, crisis tourism and not involving the local scene enough. At the same time, the five-year financial plan of documenta gGmbH, which was based on the budget of the previous documenta and only provided a budget for one city, namely Kassel, pushed the institution to its limits both logistically and financially by doubling the number of locations.
The need to rethink the Eurocentric perspective of the major international exhibition had long been announced – from Catherine David's "100 Days / 100 Guests" at documenta 10 to Okwui Enwezor's global platforms for documenta 11, of which the exhibition in Kassel was only the fifth, to the exhibition organized by documenta 13 under Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (in addition to events in Cairo, Alexandria and Banff) in Kabul and Bamiyan, Afghanistan, with 25 participating artists.
For Adam Szymczyk and his international team of curators (Pierre Bal-Blanc, Hendrik Folkerts, Candice Hopkins, Hila Peleg, Dieter Roelstraete and Monika Szewczyk), Athens was representative of the global South, which is financially disadvantaged compared to the European North. The victim of the "neocolonial and neoliberal scheme", marked by the "humiliating stigma of the crisis" (Szymczyk in his contribution to the d14 Reader), became a symbol of today's global crises and humanitarian catastrophes, which came to a dramatic head during the preparation period for documenta 14 with the war in Syria.


With Athens as the antipode to Kassel - in the sense of a "divided self" or "theater and its double" (after Antonin Artaud) - a change of perspective was to be exemplified. Instead of repeating the 100-day exhibition in Germany, documenta 14 was to take place in two locations as a "continuum of aesthetic, economic, political and social experiments" (Szymczyk), as the world could no longer be explained, commented on and narrated from a single location.
An initial manifestation of documenta 14 and its themes included a total of four biannual special issues of the magazine South as a State of Mind, which was founded in Athens in 2012 by Marina Fokidis, one of the curatorial advisors of documenta 14. The first press conference, at which the radio program Every Time A Ear di Soun with over 50 participants was also presented, took place in December 2015 in the Berlin project space SAVVY Contemporary, whose artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung acted as "Curator at Large" of documenta 14.
Also months before the official opening of the exhibition in Athens, the public program "Parliament of Bodies" was launched under the direction of Paul B. Preciado, which tested forms of post-identitarian coexistence and political action and formed six "open-form societies". It began in September 2016 with 34 "Freedom Exercises" at the Athens Municipal Art Center in Parko Eleftherias (Freedom Park). The mediation program "An Experience" took the form of walks with members of the "choir".
The selection of locations in Athens focused primarily on sites of contemporary art and cultural production, such as the Athens Conservatory (Odeion) (with a focus on sound art and scores), the recently completed National Museum of Contemporary Art EMST (whose collection, which has existed since 2000, was shown for the first time at the Fridericianum in Kassel, the traditional centerpiece of documenta, (whose collection, which has existed since 2000, was shown for the first time at the Fridericianum in Kassel, the traditional heart of documenta), the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), three buildings of the private Benaki Museum, the Archaeological and Epigraphic Museums, a disused open-air cinema and many other public squares, ancient sights and public and private buildings where individual works were shown or concerts and performances took place.
In Kassel, many of the central ideas of documenta 14 were concentrated in the Neue Galerie, where, beginning with Maria Eichhorn's installation by the Rose Valland Institute for the Clarification of Unlawful Ownership in Germany with the aim of restituting Jewish property looted under National Socialism, an associative system of references was constructed between colonialism and slavery, the complex German-Greek relations since Johann Joachim Winkelmann, expropriation politics and gender issues.
Over 160 international artists (including Nevin Aladağ, Banu Cennetoğlu, Peter Friedl, Gauri Gill, Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Naeem Mohaiemen, Otobong Nkanga, Emeka Ogboh, Artur Żmijewski) showed mostly new productions at both locations. The presentation was supplemented by historical work complexes, from book art from the Jahângîr album compiled in the 16th/17th century under the fourth Mughal emperor to socialist realist painting.
Another focus was on contemporary works by indigenous artists from various cultures, such as masks by the Kwakw'ala artist Beau Dick or works by the Sámi Artist Group (Keviselie/Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Synnøve Persen) – a fact that seemed to put the Western-influenced concept of art of some critics to the test – not least because one of documenta 14's concerns was the "unlearning" of incorporated aesthetic hierarchies. Overall, the press was almost uniformly polemical, especially from the German-language feuilleton – for example, documenta 14 was accused of instrumentalizing art and "an abysmal longing to be morally right" (FAZ).
Crowd-pullers included Marta Minujín's The Parthenon of Books (2017) on Friedrichsplatz, clad in 67,000 books that had ever been on an index, which were then distributed to visitors during the final days of the exhibition; Ibrahim Mahama's gate guards covered in coal sacks(Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901-2030. 2016-2017 (2016-17), or Olu Oguibe's The Strangers and Refugees Monument (2017) in the form of an obelisk with the gilded inscription "I was a stranger and you took me in" from the Gospel of Matthew in four languages on the Königsplatz.
The work 77sqm_9:26min - Report (2017) by Forensic Architecture, which reopened the trial surrounding the murder of Kassel-based internet café operator Halit Yozgat by the Nationalist Underground and the involvement of Andreas Temme, who was present at the time of the crime, was also politically explosive.


When documenta 14 came to an end in Kassel after a total of 163 days of concerts, film screenings, readings, performances and talks, more than one million visitors were counted in both cities. This makes documenta 14 the most visited exhibition of contemporary art of all time. In Athens, the various exhibition venues recorded 339,000 visits. As the exhibition venues in Athens were freely accessible or the entrance fees went to the respective institutions, no income was generated from the second location.
With the documenta's definitive abandonment as a "unity of action, place and time" (Szymczyk), it was - like its predecessors - barely comprehensible as an exhibition. With its doubling to two venues, the question was raised as to who "owns" documenta and whether a "world art exhibition" - on which constant growth is imposed by its structure and financing and which has had to adapt to a globally changed world after the "Cold War" - is still feasible today with a single location in Kassel. The relevance of documenta 14 and its impact on subsequent documenta exhibitions will probably only be judged after some time has passed.
Gallery
Artists
a
- Abounaddara
- Akinbiyi, Akinbode
- Aladağ, Nevin
- Andújar, Daniel García
- Anesiadou, Danai
- Angelidakis, Andreas
- Antonas, Aristide
- Araeen, Rasheed
- Auder, Michel
b
- Bachzetsis, Alexandra
- Baghramian, Nairy
- Balducci, Marie Cool Fabio
- Baloji, Sammy
- Basha, Arben
- Belmore, Rebecca
- Beqiri, Sokol
- Bernat, Roger
- Bidjocka, Bili
- Bing, Wang
- Birrell, Ross
- Blido, Llambi
- Bold, Nomin
- Brăila, Pavel
- Brătescu, Geta
c
- Cahn, Miriam
- Campos-Pons, María Magdalena und Leonhard, Neil
- Celmins, Vija
- Cennetoğlu, Banu
- Charalambous, Panos
- Chopra, Nikhil
- Ciudad Abierta
d
- Daučíková, Anna
- Davey, Moyra
- Davids, Yael
- Denes, Agnes
- Diawara, Manthia
- Dick, Beau
e
- Eichhorn, Maria
- Eijkelboom, Hans
- Ely, Bonita
- Eshetu, Theo
f
- Fofana, Aboubakar
- Friedl, Peter
g
- Galindo, Guillermo
- Galindo, Regina José
- Galván, Israel, Niño de Elche und Romero, Pedro G.
- Gbaguidi, Pélagie
- Georgiou, Apostolos
- Gianikian, Yervant und Ricci Lucchi, Angela
- Gill, Gauri
- Gioti, Marina
- González, Beatriz
- Gordon, Douglas
h
- Haacke, Hans
- Hadzinikolaou, Constantinos
- Haiduk, Irena
- Haloi, Ganesh
- Halprin, Anna
- Harding, Dale
- Harding, David
- Hassabi, Maria
- Hila, Edi
- Hiller, Susan
- Holzapfel, Olaf
- Hookey, Gordon
i
- iQhiya
- Iveković, Sanja
k
- K, Hiwa
- Kanwar, Amar
- Karmakar, Romuald
- Kassapis, Andreas Ragnar
- Khalili, Bouchra
- Knorr, Daniel
l
- Ladik, Katalin
- Lamelas, David
- Lowe, Rick
- Lucier, Alvin
m
- Mahama, Ibrahim
- Mari, Narimane
- Mata Aho Collective
- Mattin
- Mekas, Jonas
- Melitopoulos, Angela
- Meredith-Vula, Lala
- Minke, Gernot
- Minujín, Marta
- Mohaiemen, Naeem
- Ménard, Phia
n
- Nallbani, Hasan
- Nango, Joar
- Nashashibi, Rosalind und Nashashibi/Skaer
- Negros Tou Moria
- Nkanga, Otobong
- Noël, Kettly
o
- Ogboh, Emeka
- Oguibe, Olu
- Oldendorf, Rainer
- Oliveros, Pauline
- Orellana Mejía, Joaquín
p
- Papoulias, Christos
- Paravel, Véréna und Castaing-Taylor, Lucien
- Patterson, Benjamin
- Peterman, Dan
- Plessas, Angelo
- Pohio, Nathan
- Pope.L
- Postcommodity
- Prinz Gholam
q
- Quaytman, R. H.
r
- Richter, Gerhard
- Rodríguez, Abel
- Rose, Tracey
- Rosen, Roee
- Rukh, Lala
- Rungjang, Arin
- Russell, Ben
s
- Sagri, Georgia
- Samnang, Khvay
- Sara, Máret Ánne
- Scheirl, Ashley Hans
- Schultz, Marilou
- Schutter, David
- Sheikh, Nilima
- Shibli, Ahlam
- Shoshi, Zef
- Solh, Mounira Al
- Sprinkle, Annie und Stephens, Beth
- Stefani, Eva
- Subramanyan K. G.
- Suter, Vivian
- Sy, El Hadji
- Sámi Artist Group
- Šeškus, Algirdas
t
- Tserenpil, Ariuntugs
u
- Ullmann, Jakob
v
- Vicuña, Cecilia
- Vigier, Annie & Apertet, Franck
w
- Whitney, Stanley
- Wild, Elisabeth
- Wolf-Rehfeldt, Ruth
- Wüst, Ulrich
x
- Xagoraris, Zafos
z
- Zygouri, Mary
- Żmijewski, Artur
Artistic Director
Adam Szymczyk was Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017.
In 1997 he co-founded the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. From 2004 to 2014 he was Director of Kunsthalle Basel. In 2008 he co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, When things cast no shadow, with Elena Filipovic. He is a board member of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and a member of the Advisory Committee of Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation, Vienna. In 2011 he received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement from the Menil Foundation in Houston.
