Engine and transformation: collective art at the XV Documenta in Kassel
This year's Kassel Documenta raises the question "how do people create the material and immaterial infrastructure they need to nourish and sustain themselves and their ecosystems?". In the press conference of the recently opened Documenta in Kassel, the general director of the institution Sabine Schormann says “these are processes that take a lot of time”. The XV Documenta search committee formed in 2018 chose for the first time as artistic director a curatorial collective formed by artists instead of a professional curator. The collective Ruangrupa, founded in 2000 after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, proposed a Biennial made up of collectives or artists working on behalf of the collective. Altogether, it’s difficult to conceptually classify the specificities of collectives or groupings in this edition of Documenta, but it can be said that their concerns are, in general, with forms of learning, community and economy. Also, as it is largely formed by groups belonging to the geopolitical south, the problems encountered by them, which often lack financial support, also come to the fore, however, always with a proposal for a solution.
Fridericianum Portikus, Kassel 2022 © Nicolas Wefers
The Indonesian word Lumbung, used to designate a rice granary, is appropriate as a concept and working method. The Lumbung collective work dynamic is held by seven values: generosity, humour, local anchor, independence, regeneration, transparency and modesty. The exhibition therefore took on another form, in which the ruangrupa collective gave autonomy to its guests so that they could also invite other collectives to participate. This endowed the project with a non-hierarchical organization, in which, through recurring meetings during the planning period, the collectives organize themselves in the exhibition's venues by affinity of production and addressed issues.
In this edition, Ruangrupa tries to decentralize the Fridericianum Museum, normally seen as the main location of the exhibition and, for that, created the Lumbung Center in the industrial region of the city. There, several local communities were invited to exhibit their products as a way of activating, welcoming and nurturing the local economy of Kassel, Germany. In the same space, a video made by the curators of the show exposes small stories that exemplify the seven Lumbung values, welcoming the visitor inside and preparing their perception for the following projects. O lumbung member Fondation Festival sur le Niger was born in 2009 as a Malian festival of contemporary art and music. Here it created his project Vestíbulo Maaya, in reference to the room in which important conversations take place in Malian architecture, proposing a space for congregation and debate. The sculptures made by the group members are part of the highlights of the exhibition. In the same place, the Indonesian collective Jatiwangi Art Factory, which is dedicated to recovering the identity of villages that were negatively affected by the extractive policies of the dictatorial government of Suharto, participates with installations made of bricks and clay tiles and exhibits its New Rural Agenda project, proposing exchanges through conferences and radio conversations. Both collectives, as well as others that are part of the edition, present several other artists during the time of the exhibition.
Ruangrupa © Saleh Husein
The Fridericianum Museum this year is presented with collectives that are confronted with questions of historical identity and educational processes. The artist Richard Bell, who belongs to the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Goreng Goreng Aboriginal peoples, exhibits his protest paintings from the 1970s and 1980s and organized the Aboriginal Tent Embassy project, which turns 50. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, artist representing Poland at this year's Venice Biennale, as well as Bell, occupies the center of the building. Mirga-Tas, who is an activist and belonging to the Roma culture, presents her textile series Out of Egypt (2021). In her practice, she uses scraps of the clothes of her subjects to form scenes and engages in creating a Roma representation, thus confronting previous and external narratives to the community, contributing to the representativity and sense of identity. The quadriptych Birth (1983) quadriptych by Tamás Péli, a Hungarian-Roma artist who died in 1994, is displayed in a room reserved for Roma production inside the Fridericianum. Péli painted with the help of his followers a monumental canvas of epic narrative, in which he created an ethnogenesis about the creation of the Roma people. The work was made for the orphanage at Andrássy Castle, which was called Children's City and inhabited, for the most part, by children of Roma and Sinti origin. The artist intended to tell children an original story, since the birth story of many of them was a mystery and ended up creating in this place the cradle of the Hungarian Roma civic movement.
Huebner Areal Fondation Festival sur le Niger, Kassel 2022 © Maja Wirkus
Other collectives such as Asia Art Archive, Archives des Luttes des Femmes en Algerie and The Black Archives, debate issues of memory and archive. AAA, a collective concerned with the preservation of knowledge through art, exhibits installations and videos with performances by artists from Asia. Archives des Luttes des Femmes en Algérie started with a series of popular uprisings in 2019 called Hirak. Since then, the collective has dedicated itself to archiving and making available in different media the historical documents of struggle and political organizations since Algeria's independence in 1962. The Dutch-based group The Black Archives has its practice founded on decolonialism and questions, through historical documents, the construction made by European societies of the otherness of the black subject individual.
Fridericianum Foundation Class collective, Kassel 2022 © Frank Sperling
The criticism of educational systems is also present in the exhibition, especially in the propositions of Fridskul and the Foundation Class collective, who transformed the museum into a school. Occupying a large part of the ground floor, the artistic collective formed by three other collectives, in addition to creating a living area for exchanges, exposes its investigations about collective work and its processes. The Foundation Class group exhibits an installation of posters with strategies for art students, which questions the education proposed in art schools, totally focused on individual work, the object and the art market.
Fridericianum The Black Archives, Kassel 2022 © Frank Sperling
Graziela Kunsch is the only Brazilian artist in the show and has her Public Daycare project also on the museum's ground floor. Kunsch developed, in partnership with Elke Avenarius, co-founder of the Kleine Entdecker nursery in Kassel. The project that has wooden educational and recreational structures, to which children up to 3 years old and their guardians have free access. Kunsch's idea is to provide a safe space for babies to develop their motor skills, also inviting parents and guardians to enter the kids' world and adapt to their time and height, providing a space for learning and interactivity for both. Furniture and toys for children create a space that seeks not to stress the time it will take for them to grow, but provides comfort for the child to develop in their own time. The artist also displays photos of babies taken by Hungarian photographer Marian Reismann in the structure alongside books on motherhood and a video of her own daughter's motor development.
Fridericianum Fridskul Common Library, Kassel 2022 © Victoria Tomaschko
Mentions of individual authorship appear in history as early as the pre-Renaissance period between the 13th and 14th centuries. Within the capitalist context, the collective production of art in this period dictated the parameters for contemporary production. In the most common successful dynamic, ateliers employ apprentices who contribute to the production of an artistic object under the authorship of the employing artist. Little different from contemporary production, at that time the idea of the artist as a myth began. Currently and at times, artists use the workforce of several people to create the object that incorporates and launches their research and style, under the rigor of their subjectivity. Aiming at capital accumulation, more than anything else sets other economies in motion, besides the art market. Aiming at capital accumulation, more than something that sets other economies in motion, besides the art market.
Dan Perjovschi, Kassel 2022 © Documenta XV Nicolas Wefers
At XV Documenta, collective work aimed at community support is privileged. Due to the different people involved, the works presented have different styles and plural forms, however, when materialized, they commonly have an aesthetic formed by materials such as wood, fabrics and everyday objects, pointing to a less industrialized and more spontaneous and changeable production. There is an understanding of production as a process, rather than an object. Formal rigor is replaced by procedural rigor and the work is understood as a social tool. In her text Art as Encounter, the Dutch professor and essayist Anke Coumans analyzes the effects of an artistic practice outside the space of art: “when performing an act, something is set in motion that is not completely controlled”. For her, when non-artists get involved in an artistic project in the social realm, they are given the opportunity to experience artistic making. “While they become part of the work, they become part of the community” and in this process other things become visible, bringing new solutions to old problems.
Both types of production, the one that materializes in a single object and the collective one and its dynamics, are not self-excluding. Documenta, being one of the biggest contemporary exhibition projects, is also one of the biggest instances of value construction. It is certain that the artistic collectives will benefit from having participated in this project. The collective conversation networks created will certainly be of immense benefit to continue working and getting support. Can we imagine other forms of collaboration between collective production and the market? Could an artistic collective working in the field of art and education receive a partnership proposal from a school? Could a group that works with the creation of memory and identity be invited by a state to support its government? Although collective practice has been inserted as an artistic practice at least at the end of the 1960s, the Art and Language group being an example, Documenta XV proposed its canonization, showing that collective work outside the artistic space has transformative practical potential and the speculation about its absorption in the social and political environment brings hope for new solutions at a time when crises seem to repeat themselves.
Both types of production, the one that materializes in a single object and the collective one and its dynamics, are not self-excluding. Documenta, being one of the biggest contemporary exhibition projects, is also one of the biggest instances of value construction. It is certain that the artistic collectives will benefit from having participated in this project. The collective conversation networks created will certainly be of immense benefit to continue working and getting support. Can we imagine other forms of collaboration between collective production and the market? Could an artistic collective working in the field of art and education receive a partnership proposal from a school? Could a group that works with the creation of memory and identity be invited by a state to support its government? Although collective practice has been inserted as an artistic practice at least at the end of the 1960s, the Art and Language group being an example, Documenta XV proposed its canonization, showing that collective work outside the artistic space has transformative practical potential and the speculation about its absorption in the social and political environment brings hope for new solutions at a time when crises seem to repeat themselves.
Dereck Marouço is a researcher, art critic, curator and translator. He is currently enrolled in the Master Cultures of the Curatorial at the University of Fine Arts Leipzig. Lives and works in São Paulo and Berlin.
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