documenta 14

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.

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.