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.
Adam Szymczyk was Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017.
