Originally published on Artforum
Authors: Abhijan X. and Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum
At the outset, we would like to express our solidarity with ruangrupa, the lumbung artists and the staff of documenta as they continue to be subjected to political and bureaucratic harassment. We view with great concern the upsetting discourse particularly in Germany, playing out in a cynical game of liability management between politicians and public figures, which we fear will ultimately lead to a further precaritization of intellectual, artistic and other forms of labour within documenta. Or even more and more broadly in the country, to a further precaritization of Palestinian artists and all those who take a position against ongoing Israeli apartheid.
But this article isn’t about Germany, or only about it. This article starts from a painting, not the one everyone’s been writing about, but one rather ignored and quietly tucked away. In the basement of the ruruhaus in Kassel, a mural lays out ruangrupa’s curatorial strategy and concerns more clearly than any press release. It plots the trajectory from the collective’s founding in 2000 to the ongoing realization of documenta15 - interpolated by local and global events that produced twists and turns in their narrative. A statement somewhere around the beginning of the snaking lines marks the point at which “documenta is invited to join the ruangrupa ecosystem”. This seemingly cheeky turn of phrase actually articulates ruangrupa’s methods and intentions. In the first instance to bring to question what ecosystems of artistic production documenta as an institution has heretofore participated in, how its funding structures have functioned, but more crucially turns towards a consideration of how practices emerge and are sustained, and the relationship they have to exhibition making. Documenta15, then, is not only about placing abstracted art objects into symbolic circulation, but rather becomes a site for planning, thinking together, about how artistic milieus around the world might come into contact and support each other. As such, it challenges the de-facto neoliberal consensus of the art world, which continually forces us to produce under increasingly precarious circumstances, where the objects we produce are often more welcome than our bodies.
Documenta15 is not only the exhibition we experience as an audience, but rather also the program of meetings, discussions and conversations that lead up to and develop from this point of gathering. This strategy further speaks to a specificity of address - that not everything is for everyone, and that’s okay: it recognizes that different groups bring different concerns to documenta, and that there is not, nor has there ever been a singular “public”, but rather multiple communities of concern. This refusal also undoes the assumption that an exhibition must be an explication of a singular thematic, orchestrated by a genius curator and (usually) his team, but rather can be a plurality of propositions, and we can choose to or choose not to engage with them as we would like to. It redistributes the authority to make meaning, while also imagining forms of material redistribution. Thus it takes Okwui Enwezor’s or even Adam Szymczyk’s models of a distributed documenta and presses the question further - away from a model of parachuting that presumes that the “art world” happens mostly in some largely-Western cities and emanates outwards, to one where different fragments align with each at different moments. This model builds on, for example, networks such as Arts Collaboratory, which supported ruangrupa’s work in its early days of operation, and other experiments such as the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, curated by Charles Esche, Hou Hanru and Kyungwan Sung. Indeed, Arts Collaboratory’s model of accounting - where collectives report to each other rather than to a central organizational body, finds reflection in the overall structure that ruangrupa produces, and therefore in the mural as well: we see a form of public accounting, where the distribution of funding at various stages is clearly laid out and enumerated. And how different groups form Majlises and share space, and collaborate on various counts. This model of a fugitive redistribution from the market into sustaining practice has long been a part of how things have worked in the “global south” - think for instance of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s support of VER Gallery in Bangkok, that allowed generations of experimental and political work in Thailand to flourish. Thought from this perspective, this documenta pointedly raises the question of strategy, and what new models we would need to invent to be able to continue the work that we feel to be essential, across different contexts. Lumbung, then, thought of as method rather than thematic, proposes a refreshingly non-cynical inquiry into an aesthetics of redistribution, that learns from the strategies but also the failures of generations of institutional critique. The project is located thoroughly at moment of a global questioning of institutional form - following decolonial movements, and movements such as #metoo, Black Lives Matter and those calling for a questioning of where funding comes from within plutocratic neoliberal systems to ask what we could do with these “problematic” institutions. This method does not attempt to artwash or redeem reputations, but takes a much more material and practical approach, yet one that does not shy away from ideological positions.
The mural trails off into a recurring theme (nightmare?): visa issues, visa issues, a lot of collective members can’t come to Kassel because of visa issues. As a collective with a large number of members with weak passports, we chuckled in agreement. As we often ask ourselves, “How much more work could we get done each year, if we didn’t have to constantly represent ourselves to border hounds of resource-accumulating nations?” This statement also underscores how much violence is enacted as policy, and also exposes the lie of a mobile, “global” art world; it rather forces recognition of continued regimes of exclusion, built on histories of imperial control of bodies. We recalled an incredulous commentator with a European passport who couldn’t believe that the artists directing documenta could at all have problems entering Germany. Despite this, the program has placed an emphasis on artist travel, with about 1500 members of different participating collectives flying in over the course of the 100 days, for talks, performances, workshops, or even just to cook and nong-krong. Many of them are hosted in the Fridericianum, where the upper floor has been turned into a dormitory occupied by a rotating cast of collective members. There are beautiful spaces for children interspersed throughout the exhibition venues, many of them designed in collaboration with the children of members of ruangrupa. The area behind the Fridericianum is turned into the “Gudkitchen”, where artists and members of the public could eat, hang out, or join in nightly karaoke sessions, projected onto the walls of this otherwise stoic building. There is an air of conviviality that pervades the atmosphere, that invites you to spend time with others, and with the works. However, what might seem chaotic is actually undergirded by well-organized logistical system, with an ethos of commoning against the f(r)ictions of the state.
The exhibition as a whole continues this spirit of conviviality, even when often dealing with themes of violence and dispossession. Sunlight fills most spaces, and there are areas of rest for visitors. Gestures such as these produce an experience of exhibition spaces that one would actually like to spend time in, rather than bunkered halls that one rushes through while trying to consume every signifying object. Thematics do, however, emerge as you go through the spaces, with relationships to music and land being one of the most palpable. In the Fridericianum, Richard Bell’s powerful paintings set the tone for the discussion of Land Back, nearby the Rojava Film Collective’s presentation, and this which resonates throughout the different venues. Next door in the Museum of Natural History, Ikkibawikkr’s (a newly reconstituted iteration of mixrice) haunting two channel installation Tropical Story (2022) visits military infrastructures, airstrips, naval bases etc. once managed by the Japanese colonial empire. Desolate and yet haunted by funerary scores, we encounter an asphalt landscape forested or rewilded by creepers, fern and moss (Ikkibawi literally means moss stone)of (plant)of life adapting and emerging against infrastructures of violence, of life that has been left and forgotten behind. Chengdu based artist duo Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun bring to Kassel a nomadic tent weaving yak hair and fabric. The tent for them not only signifies an itinerant architecture for nomadic communities of upland Sichuan or eastern Tibet, but also a space of gathering and sharing knowledge amongst pastoralists, documenta staff, artists and visitors alike . They pair this installation up with their publications The Ecology of Sands and “Black Beach” (also found at Hafenstrasse 76), and their expansive but oneiric video installations Water System Refuge and Observing Point (both at Hafenstrasse 76). These texts and videos re-tell how communities build lifeworlds, or survive against the threatening presence of dams, modern waterways or even sand extraction. Similarly Johannesburg-based collective Madeyoulook’s joyous but insurrectionary sound piece on land politics, extraction and colonialism in South Africa envelops the undulating but layered wooden installation against the fading velvety floors of Hotel Hassenland. Across the street from the hotel at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Pınar Öğrenci’s video work Aşît (2022), she returns to her father’s hometown, Müküs, in mountainous southern Van with Turkey sharing its borders with Iran. A poetic layering of the region’s many avalanches (Aşît means avalanche in Kurdish), and genocides (against the Armenians here in 1915), the video is ‘sewn’ with a wall of white tissues collectively stitched with the women of Van, reverberating a wailing both on-screen and architecturally.
documenta15 creates space for deeply located political discussions, such as issues of caste in India, food insecurity accelerated by kleptocratic governance in the Philippines; or the situation of political disappearances in Cuba, and brings them into dialogue with each other. In the Hubner Areal, Amol K. Patil’s work emerges from his life-long discourse/engagement with India’s caste hierarchies, with its low lying lamps, and their precisely cast shadows, Patil transfers an ethos of ‘chawls’ - Mumbai’s low cost urban housing that houses factory and blue collar workers - onto Kassel. Patil’s stand out work is the video Sleep Walkers (2022), where a performer with their roller blades on with rotating brooms casually saunter through the busiest alleyways of South Bombay, while playing caste-resistance songs on their cassette players, a reference to the embodied experiences and resistance of India’s untouchable manual scavengers and cleaners. Kiri Dalena immense 5-channel video Pila (Lines) (2022) features people waiting for food and conversing their everyday lives in a severe food scarcity that the pandemic lockdown in the Philippines exacerbated. During the opening days of documenta, Dalena also unfurled a banner on the steps of the Fridericianum with the words ‘Stop The Killings’, in reference to the more than 30,000 Filipinos killed in President Duterte’s “War On Drugs”, with the words being made out of thousands of mourning pins to mark the lives lost. In the documenta halle, Tania Bruguera under the rubric of the Insituto de Artivsimo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) produces a memorial to disappeared activists and intellectuals in Cuba. These made the invitation of a collective like Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, which sat quite close to INSTAR’s work, seem quite strange: Thailand, where they are located has been undergoing a collective-driven pro-democracy political revolution that has called for a reformation of the ruling monarchy, and where cultural workers have been repeatedly at risk, and their lack of attempt to platform this in their presentation felt like a missed opportunity. Another disappointing showing was made by Party Office, who while we have solidarity with the deeply racist attacks their members have faced in Kassel, presented a body of work that seemed to lack the depth and nuance of the other more experienced collectives. Still, the selection overall points to ruangrupa’s questioning of what a collective is - not only formal or semi-formal groups of artists working together, but rather those working always in relation to others, and with a sense of accountability. It challenges the notion that collectives are formed only out of paucity of resources in the “global south”, but rather through shared political, social or aesthetic concerns, or through finding joy in learning together and from each other. However, ruangrupa’s notion of a “situatedness” and what a relationship to community could be seems slightly dated here, given that what collective practice is has also evolved considerably, and is no longer tied to nation-states, or immediate, mostly urban, localities. With the exception of a few such as Sa Sa Art Projects and SADA, few collectives seemed to include members of more than one nation-state, which sometimes gave the exhibition the overall affect of a trade fair. While the Gudskul program creates space for conversations between collectives from disparate contexts, we hope for a more robust imagination of forms of collectivization built not on perceived ideas of geographic location or cultural belonging, but on deep understandings of solidarity. documenta15 stands as a significant experiment, with both successes and failures, in institutional form and the attempt to build a truly decolonial ecosystem of artistic practices. It rejects any distinction between artistic work, and the systems that allow it to exist, in a truly life-affirming way.
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Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum