Gayatri Sinha speaks to documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and Curatorial Advisor Natasha Ginwala about the 'migrating' exhibition and its expansive idealism.
GS: Was there anything about your time as the director of Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland that prepared you for the enormity of the task of curating documenta, and its scale?
AS: If I combine the twelve years of producing exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, the amount of work would equal that of documenta, more or less.
But my problem with the Kunsthalle was that it was overall very Eurocentric and did not really venture beyond Europe. When I came to the Kunsthalle I completely lacked this kind of experience and curiosity. That’s probably why I was so curious about the kind of art that surrounds us here. In Basel, a lot of energy went into exploring things that I could reach more easily, and consequently I did not learn my lessons. Even so, sometimes I would organize ten exhibitions per year, so it was quite fast-paced.
GS: I think the only curators currently realizing a similar number of exhibitions are Hou Hanru or Hans Ulrich Obrist.
AS: But you can’t compare our situations, because Hans Ulrich is all over the place and I was based in one single institution with the exception of an exhibition at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in 2012. But my main focus during the period from 2004 to 2014 was the Kunsthalle. I was wondering what to do next and received an invitation to make a proposal for documenta. Interestingly, you can’t apply to curate documenta.
GS: What was your proposal?
AS: My proposal was to realize it in two cities, and to use these cities as vantage points to look at two very different contexts. One of these contexts was to be the Mediterranean, thereby connecting documenta to many cities outside of the European continent, and at the same time to Athens, a place which Europe likes to see as its cradle and the birthplace of democracy.
GS: You have a very young team that is working with very old themes. All epic literature concerns itself with migration, journeys across the world. In that sense, your themes are universal.
AS: Yes, but the young team, these are exactly the people who have grown up with disillusionment. I think that we have lost the feeling of security of a certain era. Maybe we were never safe or secure, but at least we believed or were told to believe in it, and now we don’t anymore. I suspect this may be the reason why we become involved with these kinds of subjects.
GS: Do you see this as a universal insecurity or is it a particularly European phenomenon?
AS: It describes a moment when Europe realizes that it is very problematic to exercise cultural authority from here, and that it is going to be pretty difficult to maintain this hegemonic position. Furthermore, that it is counterproductive to attempt to do so, because the consequence is that you live in a fortress that is not really open to others.
GS: When you came and presented a lecture in Delhi in early 2014 you seemed to suggest that you would engage with minor histories, in a Deleuzian sense. At documenta 14, even when you chose to show, say, classical Mughal painting, you did not choose a leading Mughal painter. Or take a Christian painting like St. Anthony Abbot Tempted by Gold by Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi: These are artists that we may not know and perhaps there are more famous renditions to choose from.
AS: To speak for the traditions that I’m more familiar with: it makes a different to show Pavel Filonov, the Russian constructivist. There was one show of his work in 1990 at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, but other than that nothing in Europe. There was an exhibition in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1988, which I saw and still remember-I was eighteen years old. It was unbelievable.
documenta is a place where you can fulfill your dream of bringing in certain pieces that are dear to you and physically have them installed and be with them for a while.
GS: There’s a very strong ethical approach that your work has to homelessness and migration. You also make the show migrate and simultaneously embed it in its traditional hometown Kassel. If Athens at some time was at the zenith of democracy and art, it now seems to be at some kind of economic nadir and you bring the exhibition from Athens to a capitalist economy. What did this migration signify?
AS: It was exactly about not allowing things to stay where they are supposed to stay. It is almost a dissonance or faux pas to insert a major part of the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens into the very center of documenta with its international tradition of engagement with modern art, and to introduce a very powerful line of this, let’s say, minor history. Among other things, Greek art is also one of these minor histories within Modernism. In many ways, the intention of this exhibition was to produce a series of experiences, of effects of alienation, so that between the different parts there is no smooth transition-with some exceptions.
GS: Even within a particular site?
AS: Within particular sites, it leaves you with the feeling that something remains open or is left unfinished. It’s a nervous exhibition and a very beautiful one at the same time. There is beauty and serenity but also a feeling of imminence.
GS: There is also tenderness and great cruelty.
AS: Yes, exactly.
NG: One of the things that have been spoken about in relation to the migration of the exhibition between two cities is also what it has meant for the artists to experience this and be a witness to this bi-location. From having made their first research trips they begin to directly encounter the paradoxical reality of both sites and bring a ‘third view’ from their own context.
AS: It’s interesting to look at the two locations through the perspective of the artists and also the team working on the exhibition, through a kind of anthropomorphic metaphor. documenta is one exhibition in two parts.
GS: It’s a subversive kind of a structure.
AS: Metaphorically, documenta was never in Athens. I will not, however, conflate the kind of language with which we speak about migration with the condition of the refugee, I would not make our exhibition appear as a migrating body. I would see it rather as two frames that allow or enable all of these migrating bodies, including the bodies of the artists, to articulate something within them.
GS: You use this metaphor of the frames and place works in such a way that while we are compelled to look at one frame, the other is nudging itself into our field of vision. For instance, across the room from the fifteenth-century painting St. Anthony Abbot Tempted by Gold by Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi is a ribald work by Hans Ashley Scheirl, golden balls as a reference to temptation and titillation. Indian artist Nilima Sheikh shares a space with sixteenth-century engravings of three classical scenes, the Holy Family on their way to Nazareth, the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Torment of Marsyas. How doyouwantthe viewer to read this? Does the constellation enable a reading by a European viewership, does it place the narrative of trauma and pain within a recognizable frame?
AS: I think it’s about looking at these iconographies more in terms of the idea of image production across cultures: there is a kind of universal ambition. This is apparent in a twenty-five-meter embroidery created by Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba, encompassing cosmogony and history, but also in a multi-channel video by Michel Auder in the underpass by the Kassel train station which is modeled on the nineteenth-century paintings of the cycle The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. Their imagery is mostly contemporary, even though they are religious paintings. They are presented in a very contemporary cut-and-paste manner. I think this is not very far from works that seem to propose much more cohesive narrations such as that of Nilima [Sheikh] which, although formal, are completely unified through the delicacy and extreme finesse of the treatment of the painting. But it has been cut and pasted from many sources, many stories have been brought together. The form is very seductive. It is uniform and regular, but when you begin to read the many quoted texts, incongruousness and violence come to the fore very quickly.
NG: With Nilima’s work, which involves learning and sourcing from varied pictorial traditions including Perisan and Mughal miniature stlyes, the pairing of a manuscript like the Jahangir Album, and indeed to choose these three very specific folios from the Berlin State Library meant to gaze further into the subject matter of loss, epic narrativization around birth and apocalypse. Also, the way that a beheading might be painted in her work and the flayed Marsyas now stand in proximity.
AS: This also comes forth beautifully in the performance A Reading That Loves-A Physical Act by Yael Davids. There is a moment in the performance where Davids employs a gesture of giving and a gesture of taking or expecting. These hand movements are almost like mudras. They also create a strong connection to the room within which the performance takes place: it contains, among other things, reproductions of drawings by Cornelia Gurlitt, the sister of the Nazi art hoarder Hildebrand Gurlitt. For Cornelia Gurlitt, the idea of mixing a religious depiction of generosity from the Bible with the very harsh reality of war suggested itself because she was a nurse in military hospitals in Vilnius during the First World War. She produced this entire body of work there. After the end of the war she came to Berlin, and, tragically, committed suicide one year later.
GS: I was actually fascinated by the biblical references. Their aesthetic value is a very powerful instrument in the exhibition. And then on top of that you bring in minor narratives around St. Anthony.
AS: I wanted to bring several figures into the exhibition that spoke about willful self-dispossession, a rejection of materiality in many ways. Natasha [Ginwala] for instance brought Buddha sculptures from the Gandhara period. In many different ways they tell the biggest story of self-dispossession-physical and mental leading to an enlightened state and the spread of ones’ teachings. Illustrated in the documenta reader is the painting by Gustave Courbet of a utopian, socialist, futurist, and apostolic juncture. It is a nineteenth-century image of a man on the road who has given up his job and decides to take on issues by going from village to village in France. Courbet himself left his possessions behind and set out on a quest for “universal harmony.” So once you see this figure along with St. Anthony, you begin to see other figures which basically represent the ideal of abandonment of certain things. I was struck by a remark in a 1997 interview I did with the Polish artist Pawel Althamer who at the very end of the conversation, when I asked him where he sees his position as an artist in society, said: “An artist is a man without place.” This idea of not having a place resonated with me for a long time.
GS: Very close to Sufism…
AS: Yes, our show is very mystical actually [laughs].
GS: It’s interesting that the exhibition uses the human body considerably, while it is not about inhabiting the body. Instead, the exhibition is about all kinds of other values around the body, which is also what creates some of the discomfort in the reading.
AS: Take the work of Lorenza Böttner: things like painting or sculpture are related to an idea of the mastery of the hand. Lorenza Böttner had no hands and still her work is a compelling visual expression that is completely crafted. But it is done differently, maybe comparable to the work of David Schutter.
GS: David Schutter seems to be the perfect artist in the context of your exhibition to exemplify the embedding of lateral histories. In referring to someone like Leonardo, he produces a kind of drawing. This allowed for rich genealogies of art history to enter into the show…
AS: Schutter’s works are studies of Leonardo or any other master, ways of approximation to render some kind of object. David Schutter also portrayed drawings by Max Liebermann who, in this case, is more like a role model, allowing us to speak about the absent state of restitution. It’s an absence on multiple levels.
GS: To come back to Lorenza Böttner and also in regard to Alina Szapocznikow’s works, taking the form of tumors: they speak to each other in a way which suggests absence and excess. Both works are about the human body in some state of denial and reconstitution of value, including sexual energy. This kind of annotation is central to your curation.
In contrast, on the first floor of the Neue Galerie, we are looking at modernisms from other cultures including ours from India. I couldn’t understand the presence of works by Amrita Sher-Gil, but the inclusion of the Gandhara sculptures is delightful, perhaps because Gandhara is also the confluence of Asia and the West.
NG: Circulating around the first gallery and taking the turn from Lorenza Böttner to the works by Alina Szapocznikow, the body becomes something like a scheme, where evidence of violence and trauma ultimately resides in this body-in-pieces and its embedded memories. The framing of the nation-state is again disrupted on the second level in the experience of colonialism.
AS: Some pieces such as the recontextualization of the Länderfiguren are a response to the book Who Sings the Nation-State? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler from 2007. On the one hand this very stiff and hierarchical arrangement of the European art nations in the number of eight or something-we made them dance a little bit by pushing the Länderfiguren of Germany and Greece forward-but they are mobilized. Then you have these collages which are scores by Katalin Ladik. Some of them are about folk songs, but folk songs arenotidenticalwith the kind of homogeneity of the nation-state and its cultural and mighty expression.
GS: So you do challenge the Western canon in a very big, substantial way.
NG: Let me add to this André Pierre, who was a Vodou priest, and his encounter with Maya Deren, an avant-garde poet, painter, and writer who I see as a contemporary of Amrita Sher-Gil, two very strong women. Deren was a Ukrainian Jew, she went to Haiti with the choreographer Catherine Dunham and started to document voudou ritual ceremonies, dance and music. Amrita Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian I see as a negation of the white colonial gaze in the sense that she is revealing herself fully in order to stage herself in a dynamic confluence: being Indian-Hungarian, having studied in Paris, and yet rejecting the European exoticism of the time that formed the reference point for male artists.
GS: Is she rejecting or embracing this exoticism? She also plays into it.
NG: She plays into it but she maintains complete authorship that composed space, while playing with references of European modernism.
GS: Or she performs it even as she celebrates it. We could think in those terms as well.
NG: Yes, through herself. Seen as one of many self-portraits, it is one unique episode, but added into a context such as we have here, it forms a richer reading.
GS: Would you like to speak about the other Indian artists? Ganesh Haloi, for example, or the terracotta reliefs by K. G. Subramanyan, about your choice of artists and the choice of works?
NG: I have been working with Ganesh Haloi for four years now and remain gripped by his painterly vocabulary. Adam met him nearly three years ago when we went to Kolkata, and he has seen Haloi’s works that we showed at the 8th Berlin Biennale as well.
GS: Do you see him as post-Cubist or a Cezannesque kind of a figure?
AS: You do see analogies with Paul Klee and so on, but I remember this train ride from Kolkata to Santiniketan in the early morning, looking at the fields. I saw a tree and it became clear to me…
NG: Yes, this travel across the landscape marked a clear resonance between the painted space and the geographic terrain Bengal. These are the spaces of his own migration from Bangladesh to India. It is very telling that he did a major solo exhibition and shared the proceeds with his hometown in Bangladesh. He is still attached to what this severing of the subcontinent means in personal terms.
GS: A very porous border …
AS: Yes, exactly! We were interested in looking at Bengal across borders and in a kind of historical trajectory, as the politics of the area have been changing. On the other hand the selection of Indian or Southeast Asian artists is not the best strategic choice. Instead it is a proposal based on conversations we had.
NG: Haloi was very interested in archaeology, in heritage, architecture, and how even the texture and pigmentation in his work derive from an exposure to this long history. The positioning was very important: here in Kassel, we are showing his works at the Hessisches Landesmuseum. In the museum’s original installation there are agrarian implements displayed just there. In Athens you have paintings that look like rhythm formations, lines in motion and scores, which are shown at the Athens Conservatoire, a building dedicated to music. This was a deliberate way to contextualize Haloi’s abstraction and the uniqueness of it.
GS: documenta operates at numerous sites, and as we move from site to site there seems to be a very polemical arrangement. From venue to venue you get a sense of issues of war, issues of colonization. Within the Natural History Museum, featuring maps by Keviselie (Hans Ragnar Mathisen) and others, the suggestion of anthropological material seems to be a very obvious frame.
AS: Obviously we were not fully satisfied with the type of narrations that we found in museums in general. This particular museum has instances of the proposed typology, so it was an occasion for us to hopefully create as many temporary museums as there could be through the work of the documenta artists. The Neue Galerie in Kassel, for example, is not meant in to be an embodiment of a new canon. Rather, it is a process of continuous decolonization, removing certain facts from the pedestals where they are supposed to support the sculptures of “art nations.” Our project was about unsettling the canon.
NG: I was just at the Stadt Museum earlier today. Hiwa K has made a film reflecting on the city of Kassel and himself as a fictitious character: there is a poetic relationship between the protagonist and the destroyed city, and a double take on one’s own displacement and becoming a stranger to oneself. What becomes animated in this film is the very model of the city of Kassel and its destruction.
GS: This year you have increased the number of artists very substantially to 163. The exhibition is very large and demanding. You are making us work harder to make connections. I read one review which stated that you cannot respond to this show quickly, and that is absolutely true.
One of the questions I had was particularly with regard to the Western canon and areas of exclusion. First, what or who do you exclude? I met a Brazilian curator today who said he hadn’t seen a single Brazilian artist. How do you exclude whole parts of continents? The other question is: did you consider, while assembling the exhibition, how Okwui Enwezor challenged the Western canon? His style of curating is intensely muscular and strong. Your concerns are similar to his, but this show requires a much more intimate reading, it is slower, you literally turn it page by page. The formats are small, they compel you to come very close.
AS: We are showing works by artists from Kosovo and from Mongolia from historical and contemporary. Maori artists from New Zealand. We might not have included Brazilian artists, but I would say to the Brazilian artists to enjoy the Mongolians.
GS: But the question is: how do you choose? You may expect a big bang Chinese or Brazilian art object and you don’t get it.
NG: Which stories should be told about China? I think that is very important today: how you talk about it in this context. There is for instance the film work by Wang Bing which marks the industrial scope of the Chinese economy and its social impact. Adam definitely refers to this exhibition as a non-national documenta. This is significant, because Indigenous and First Nations people are often not seen as protagonists and key players of the modern nation-state.
GS: I was glad to see that you are showing Beau Dick's work at the documenta Halle. I was wondering how you would translate the concerns of the First Nations or the Maori, or the Sámi, how they would penetrate into the viewers’ consciousness.
NG: Their concerns need to not be isolated and treated in a special way but rather as nuanced contributions withinthetexture ofthis project. It would be similar to Rajesh Vangad's work with Gauri Gill. The point is not to create alienated zones, obviously because that would go against what this kind of approach intends.
GS: I have a question about the different publics, specifically in regard to We (all) are the people, the work by Hans Haacke. What does the notion of the public mean to you? This is a concept that has been discussed from Longinus to Habermas and beyond. Here, the notion of the publics has been revised, or understood differently, so I was wondering whether there is some kind of philosophic, poetic, or a humanistic approach.
AS: Do you mean publicness as a dimension of the exhibition or the public as those who are coming to see the exhibition?
NG: I think it makes sense to cite Olu Oguibe’s work, Monument for Strangers and Refugees. A lot of the works of documenta 14 challenge the idea of what to do in public space, how to inhabit space such that publics are generated around the work in a certain way.
AS: Olu's obelisk is, to my knowledge, the first public monument in Kassel that has a sizeable inscription in Arabic. There is an obelisk dedicated to some German heroes, very dubious military men of the nineteenth century behind the Bibliothek (the library). The obelisk was a monument of Germanization in the nineteenth century. Olu Oguibe’s obelisk is different due to the message that it carries. It becomes a public monument and a highly provocative one too. It is very precisely positioned: exactly on the border between the part of the city that is mostly white and institutional, and this other part. In a very interesting way the monument is set in the in-between zone of these two urban parts, almost like a sundial. We have a number of works that qualify as public monuments, such as The Parthenon of Books by Marta Minujín, The Mill of Blood by Antonio Vega Macotela, etc. This comments on how the city is configured as a public space but a space with a lot of limitations and a lot of borders. We tried to a) identify these borders and b) unsettle them, change their course or erase them all together.