documenta takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, and is one of the largest, longest running, and best-known contemporary art festivals in the Western World. According to the exhibition's five-year economic plan from 2019-2023, the budget for documenta fifteen (d15) was ?42.2 million.1 d15 (2022) welcomed over 730,000 visitors over one hundred days. The Jakarta-based artist collective ruangrupa (established in 2000) were appointed artistic directors and proposed "lumbung" (a term for a type of collectively managed rice barn) as a theme for the curatorial approach. The concept mobilized the term for curatorial practice to signal that modalities of collaboration, redistribution, and collective governance are key to conceptual processes and material realization of a collective that produces art and social gatherings. In the spirit of the lumbung, ruangrupa invited other artists and art collectives, primarily from the Global South, to organize the various parts of the exhibition. Initially, ruangrupa invited seventy-two artists and art collectives, which in turn invited an additional 1,500 artists, activists, and writers from their extended ecosystems to participate in the exhibition and related public programming.
The announcement and unfolding of d15 was met with both celebration and contention as the global art community and art theorists widely welcomed the curatorial format for its non-hierarchical, decentralized, and non-universalistic approach.2 Against the backdrop of global inequalities (which are often discursively rather than materially attended to in global art projects), d15 continues the conflictual aesthetics of "biennials of resistance"3 and seemingly enacted what David Graeber refers to as "fragments" of dispersed social, political, and economic experimentation.4 These fragments exhibit, in part, struggles of survival and resistance where communities learn to live together in an increasingly precarious global economic system that revolves around subjection based upon national origin, ethnicity, gender, and skin color.
Following the revealing of the Yogyakarta-based collective Taring Padi's colossal work People's Justice (2002), in which figures evoking classical anti-Semitic stereotypes set off alarms, a cascade of events unfolded. These included: charges made by Global South artists who experienced racial and transphobic harassments in Kassel; rallies of solidarity with ruangrupa by a number of artists in documenta and beyond; and withdrawals and distancing from other documenta participants, along with the resignation of the CEO of documenta. The public, the news media, politicians, and some art critics both in Germany and across the world reacted to what happened during the exhibition. This controversy set forth a context in which such critics debated the exhibition's form, characterizing it as "DIY Chaos,"5 "inclusive-to a fault,"6 "without appropriate contextualization and reflection,"7 a product of European funding,8 or even a kind of "cultural 9/11."9 These debates, whose flames were stoked by the media frenzy, came about in a context of near-constant accusations of racism, wokeism, anti-Semitism, among others, and engendered conversations about decolonial politics, identity politics,10 colonialism's heritage,11 the obfuscation of the German colonial context,12 and the role of economic, social, and cultural inequalities between artists, curators, and institutional actors and inequalities between Europe and the home countries of many of the artists.13 As a result, critics put the future of documenta as an institution into question.14 Just as debates over d15 calmed, documenta sixteen was already on fire. This time triggered by anti-Semitism charges levied at a member in the finding committee of documenta sixteen.
It is within the context of these contradictory reactions that I begin my inquiry. Specifically, I evaluate the infrastructures and ideologies in place that facilitated the form of d15 and continue to facilitate contemporary art practices in the Global South-a contentious term in itself. While the emergence of the term aimed to replace previous problematic terms such as "Third World" and "non-Western," the term Global South nonetheless, as Walter Mignolo writes, reinforces the premises of an unequal world order.15 Most public debates on d15 have generally accepted the position that it exhibited art practices "from" the Global South in the Global North, however, the relation of the South to the North is far more nuanced and in need of investigation, especially in light of the public reaction to the exhibition.
The first two sections in this chapter were written during the fermenting debates over d15, focusing on its organizational form and political intentions to investigate those nuances between the North and the South. As such, they capture the urgency for art practitioners to shape a discourse when public opinion was in freefall. In section 2.1, I reproduce an essay I originally published in e-flux Journal titled "What Politics? What Aesthetics?: Reflections on documenta fifteen," in which I analyze the cultural context in which the concepts of d15 were formed, the politics of showcasing art from the Global South in the Global North, and the political economy of NGO-funded art initiatives that have a developmentalist agenda. In section 2.2, I include my contribution to the publication of the highly mediated symposium Kontroverse documenta fifteen. Hintergru¨nde, Einordnungen und Analysen (Controversial documenta fifteen. Background, classification and analysis) in Hamburg for the German audience, where I trace the discussions of the notion of "community" in peasant societies in Southeast and East Asia and point out what is at stake in invoking the "community" in "community art" in the Global South. Both texts look to the possibility of expressing and activating an internationalist and emancipatory politics in the arts sector in the Global North. The last text, section 2.3, is a postscript to the chapter, addressing debates on the future of documenta as the process of documenta sixteen has been under renewed public scrutiny.
The anti-Semitism debates appear to tear at what remains of the veneer of art globalization because they reveal fundamental divergences in perspectives (unlike the presented unipolar liberalism) and break apart previously held assumptions of a rather universal "cosmopolitanism." However, to only learn this from what transpired at Kassel is not enough. In what follows, I unpack components that are taken for granted in the liberal alignment discussed in Chapter 1, such as the individual, community, civil society, and notions of progress, and map them onto the partially disjointed realities across the Global North and South that cause some of the fundamental misreadings of d15. Along the way, I take note of practical reasonings (by which I mean pragmatic forms of inquiry that do not trade on preset value judgements) of institution-building from the Global South that tease out ways to (paradoxically) come to the defense of documenta-not in its former image as a bastion of art in a globalized world, but as an institutional force to be reckoned with in a post-globalization world.
Whether d15 should be defended is not the question. The question is how it can be defended in a way that also allows for a constructive critique of the exhibition.
A local group had already levied accusations of anti-Semitism on Palestinian participants in d15 four months before the exhibition opened, which quickly escalated to become a national news story, and was later made real by the actual exhibition. This cast dark clouds over what is arguably the world's largest contemporary art exhibition and culminated with documenta's decision in June to remove a banner made by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi depicting the political violence of the Suharto regime, in which the public noticed anti-Semitic caricatures. Prior to this, a cascade of events had been fermenting for months. These include a January blog post16 by a small Kassel-based organization decrying members of the Palestinian collective The Question of Funding as anti-Semitic; a cancelled series of public debates on anti-Semitism and racism in May; various instances of inadequate crisis management by documenta; and before the opening, the exhibition space of the Palestinian collective was vandalized with a cryptic death threat. All the while, pressure was building up at the top levels of German politics, where the Green cultural minister was involved in mitigating the scandal since the first allegation.
Before the conflicts had grown to a fever pitch, under the theme of "lumbung," a metaphor for sharing, commons, solidarity, gift giving, and mutual aid, the exhibition venues were transformed into buzzing showcases of art and activism, collaborative community-building processes, and various archival projects that are revisited and kept alive. The accompanying programming, from talks to DJ sets, from shared meals to cleansing rituals, extended the gesture of hospitality to the audience and lent the event a festive atmosphere. The media was split between homing in on perceived instances of anti-Semitism (such as the German weekly Der Spiegel's overstatement of "Antisemita 15"17) and cheerleading...
