Claims of antisemitism at the latest edition of contemporary art fair Documenta have shifted focus away from the festival's richest lineup ever.

Not much ever happens here in Kassel, with one giant exception: Documenta.

Every five years, for exactly 100 days this otherwise nondescript central German town (where Nina’s family hails from and where we landed after our pandemic-induced “Bourexit” from Algeria) hosts one of the world’s largest modern art fairs.

Documenta was founded by a local curator in the 1950s to expose Germans to the new styles they had missed during the Nazi era, when censors severely limited what foreign influences filtered into the country. (That first edition included works by Chagall, Miró, Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and more.)

Since then, Documenta has developed into one of the contemporary art world’s premier events, having showcased works by eminent painters and sculptors (Dalí, Warhol, Christo, Basquiat, Ai Weiwei, Johns, Close, Lichtenstein), photographers (Cartier-Bresson), writers (Carroll, Saïd, Soyinka), filmmakers (Scorsese, Kubrick, Godard) and more—including many outside the list of household names recognizable to casual fans like me. The last edition drew over a million visitors, making it “the most-visited contemporary art exhibition of all time.”

We were among them. Back in 2017, Nina and I traveled from Algiers to visit her family and tour the 14th edition of Documenta, whose centerpiece was a full-size replica of the Parthenon, erected on the central square where the local Nazi party once held book burnings. Instead of marble, this temple was made from scaffolding decked with thousands of banned books from around the world. Alongside questions of free expression, many of that year’s artworks grappled with the ongoing refugee crisis stemming from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That’s not unusual for Documenta; past editions have featured artists’ responses to the Cold War and a divided Germany, the AIDS crisis, apartheid in South Africa, and other issues of the day.

While originally centered in the handful of museums downtown, over the years Documenta’s installations have increasingly spilled out across the city, ballooning in tandem with our ever-expanding definition of just what art is, and what it might be. Recent editions of Documenta have brought fields of poppies, a pig sty, a boulder in a tree, a giant anchor, a hole a kilometer deep, 7,000 newly planted trees, and 1,001 aimless Chinese visitors to central Kassel (yes, that last one was by Ai Weiwei). After each edition, the city of Kassel procures several works to maintain as permanent installations, bringing welcome cultural texture to the city and building anticipation across the next 4+ years.

I was certainly feeling that anticipation by the time Documenta fifteen opened earlier this summer to initially positive reviews. But this year’s edition has been dogged by controversy, sadly diminishing the festival's impact.

Mural of scenes from classic Bengali films by Britto Arts Trust

Diverse Voices

Each edition of Documenta is headlined by a guest curator selected to make key choices around the expositions' themes, venues, artists, and more, shaping the event's tone and making each edition unique. This year's selection, an Indonesian art collective called ruangrupa, wasted no time putting their mark on the show. In contrast to the staid, classic custodianship of many of Documenta's past curators, ruangrupa invited dozens of other artist collectives, few of whom had defined memberships, confounding efforts to determine the identities or even the number of participating artists. While past editions have been gradually embracing non-Western art, this year a majority of the artists hail from the Global South. Many of the "artworks" are specially designed spaces where visitors are invited to participate in discussions, art lessons, or other fleeting interactive events, or simply to hang out. Just as ruangrupa hoped, the lines separating the artists from the spectators, and the artwork from the world around it, fade and sometimes dissolve entirely.

When Nina and I visited earlier this summer, along with Stella and my mom, who was making a well-timed visit from the US, we enjoyed a dazzling large-format Kurdish music video, a Vietnamese artist's sound installation in a pitch-black medieval cellar, remixed furniture sculptures by a Tunisian collective, Congolese photo collages and intricate Roma paintings, low-budget action films from a Ugandan studio, Thai artists teaching skateboarding in a mid-gallery halfpipe, and so much more. Many works sought explicitly to raise visitors' awareness of the global climate crisis, racial justice issues in the US, forced disappearances in Cuba, or other pressing challenges. I was pleased to come across the Archives of Women's Struggles in Algeria, an initiative several young Algerian women undertook to collect and share artifacts of their forebears' long (and unfinished) quest for equality.

In one full day, we had barely scratched the surface of the festival's 32 venues, yet already I emerged with a sense of awe at the rich array of human expression we encountered. But pick up an article on Documenta in the press today and that's not what you'll find.

The Stain of Scandal

Instead, you'll read about how, on the festival's opening weekend, an outcry erupted over allegedly antisemitic figures spotted within a 2002 mural by an Indonesian arts collective, a critique of the violent legacy of Indonesia's Suharto regime. The work was promptly covered then removed, and the artists and curators issued apologies. But this being Germany, that was neither the beginning nor the end of the story.

Whether to atone for the darkest period in its history, ensure such tragedies never recur, or some combination thereof, Germany's government, civil society, and citizens take great pains to banish antisemitism from public life. While born of admirable purpose, these efforts can sometimes overreach, as in 2019 when Germany's parliament officially declared the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement antisemitic. The same week in June when Documenta opened, Germany's Goethe Institut uninvited prominent Palestinian activist Mohammed el-Kurd from a conference, triggering accusations that "German guilt is being used to silence Palestinians."

In this charged context, ruangrupa already found itself in some local activists' sights—accused of excluding Israeli artists and supporting BDS—months before Documenta launched. As the opening neared, the organizers and a pair of Palestinian artist collectives were targeted with Islamophobic vandalism. The scandal over the mural was more than enough to ignite a full-blown controversy that has since consumed German and international coverage of this year's Documenta and elicited escalating shows of outrage from leading German politicians. It also prompted organizers to appoint a review panel and announce that all the show's artworks would be "inspected" in partnership with a local Jewish center. Thinking back to the Parthenon of banned books, and further back to Documenta's origins as an attempt to right the wrong of Nazi censorship, I was reminded that, for all our similarities, Germans and Americans hold very different views on freedom of expression.

When we visited in the days after the scandal broke, we encountered at least one exhibition that was closed, accompanied by a handwritten sign announcing an artists' strike, decrying "censorship and removal of works," and calling for open debate around curatorial decisions. In early July, one prominent artist, frustrated by how fully the fixation on scandal had eclipsed the art itself, officially withdrew from the show (further exacerbating the very problem she was lamenting). The festival's director general resigned, too. And soon after, buried in that Algerian women's movement archive, a visitor unearthed another image—this one drawn in the 1980s by a Syrian artist—decried as antisemitic, adding yet more fuel to the fire.

Workshop and exhibition space of Tunisian artist collective El Warcha

Missed Opportunity

The media's self-fulfilling frenzy over "scandal at Documenta" has dented visitor numbers, which thus far lag behind last edition's.

That's a shame for the many local restaurateurs, shopkeepers, and hoteliers who count on an influx of art-watchers for a regular windfall. (Nina's brother and his partner, for example, have spent years fixing up rental apartments in anticipation of this summer, only to see booking rates fall short of their expectations.)

Most importantly, it's a shame that fewer people will get to experience the diverse voices and messages of tolerance and inclusion that actually pervade the exhibition halls at this year's Documenta—perhaps the first edition to actually reflect a world of art rather than just the elite, wealthy, mostly white and Western art world. It's through voices and messages like these that art shows like Documenta actually expand visitors' horizons and chip away at fear, hatred, and bigotry in society. Antisemitism is one form of bigotry among many, and fighting it is important and necessary. But by focusing exclusively on that fight at the expense of other considerations, have the organizers, the politicians, and the media undermined efforts to combat other forms of bigotry?

I fear they might have, namely by revitalizing the quieter, pervasive bigotry that has long led Western curators to focus on Western artists and Western audiences, leaving "the art world" limited, impoverished, and far less worldly than it might be. "They're definitely going to get an old white guy to curate the next Documenta," Nina mused amid this summer's frenzy of controversy.

Such a regression looks likely, based on leaders' recent unwillingness to consider that maximalist campaigns against one form of bigotry might hinder the fight against others, and their reticence to pursue the harder, messier path of examining all parties' claims, perspectives, and contexts, and weighing them to negotiate a compromise that serves all marginalized voices, not just a select few.

Views on these important societal questions range widely, of course. Whatever your perspective, if you're in the area, I encourage you to visit the show. Documenta fifteen runs until September 25. More information here.