Documenta11

Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor was the first non-European to head documenta - the first documenta in the new millennium is regarded as the first truly global, post-colonial documenta. "documenta 11 is based on five platforms that attempt to describe the contemporary place of culture and its interfaces with other complex global knowledge systems." The exhibition in Kassel was therefore only the fifth and final platform in the concept of Okwui Enwezor and his team of curators - consisting of Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya. One year before the official opening, transdisciplinary "platforms" on various themes took place on four continents: "Democracy as an unfinished process (Vienna, 15. 3.-20. 4. 2001; Berlin, 9.-30. 10. 2001), "Experimenting with Truth: Legal Systems in Transition and the Processes of Truth-Finding and Reconciliation" (New Delhi, 7-21. 5. 2001), "Créolité and Creolization" (St. Lucia, 13-15. 1. 2002) and "Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos" (Lagos, March 16-20, 2002).

Many of the artistic works then shown in the exhibition took up these themes and other global problems in various ways. In keeping with the premise that "art is the production of knowledge", many projects were documentary in character - however, the fear that the show would be too "theory-heavy" (a biased assessment that had already proven inaccurate at documenta 10) did not materialize. As Wolfgang Lenk writes in his catalog essay, the main achievement of documenta 11 was to question "the unspoken hierarchies of attention of the Western exhibition system", to "deny the legitimacy of the West's exoticizing view of 'the foreign' and to confront perception with those artistic activities that thwart our projection. [...] The 'strangers' were the objects of our gaze - now they look back". The change of gaze that Catherine David had prepared in 1997 was now finally accomplished.

The works installed in the Auepark also referred to complex contexts far beyond their sculptural appearance - for example Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's "Sculpture Park" made up of elements such as a telephone box from Brazil, a rose bush from Le Corbusier's rose garden in Chandigarh, India, and a lava stone from Mexico.Brazil, a rose bush from Le Corbusier's rose garden in Chandigarh, India, and a lava stone from Mexico, which formed an associative reference system of cultural symbols, or Renée Green's open-air pavilion Standardized Octogonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (2002) consisting of eight units with audiovisual material on seemingly disparate themes such as the alphabet, Africa, color, island, food, work, woman, man, gender and others.

And deep in Kassel's Nordstadt district, which is considered a social hotspot, Thomas Hirschhorn erected his Bataille Monument (2002) in the middle of a social housing estate. The archive about the thinker of free spending and critic of utility, built in collaboration with local young people from cheap building materials, was open to the residents - an experiment between success and failure that, with its various problems, revealed the still difficult dialog between contemporary art and the so-called "social underclass".