About
As we close the first quarter of the twenty-first century, global affairs across both wealthy and disenfranchised regions of the world can be described as being in a state of shattered expectations. The examples are numerous and well-rehearsed. We confront war, mass displacement, ecological catastrophe, unfettered technological encroachment, ascendant autocracies, the erosion of rights, and a broad disregard for human life after decades of resource extraction, border partition, and economic integration. As the constellation of economic and military superpowers once convened under the auspices of international stability now act with singular, nationalist impunity, a global project of peace now recedes from view. In its place, new and often violent conditions for another world order emerge.
Crisis has borne many names throughout history.
While aesthetic attention alone cannot reform our reality, art remains a mode of thinking in the present tense. From Boston to Bratislava, at the chasm between national political projects and cultural spheres, art creates spaces where people gather in microcosms of self-determined discourse. Rather than cataloging events, documenta sixteen honors artists as they respond to existential and material instability, developing strategies for living amid planetary indeterminacy. For many artists around the world, these circumstances are not exceptional. They are the conditions of everyday life, and the knowledge they produce is instructive, offering a prophetic vision of how we exist today. Out of shattered promises, in transient migration and the aftermath of being unmoored from earth, in perpetual loss and a world afire, we divine what remains of past utopian aspirations and determine where our frameworks require revision. This should be done with precision and without fear of what remains incomprehensible. We may find guidance in disrupted logic, flattened hierarchies, and nonlinear reasoning. Hopefully, our futures will know better histories than the ones we have inherited.
There is a difference between prophetic vision and provocation.
Prophetic vision seeks understanding, while provocation seeks reaction. By nature, reactionary tactics define themselves through opposition. documenta sixteen will not tolerate denigrations or prejudice toward any individual or group, especially based on national origin, cultural heritage, religious creed, sexual orientation, gender expression, financial status, physical abilities, family arrangements, sexual preferences, or the sins of their fathers, siblings, or their mothers. The exhibition welcomes a culture of discourse, debate and argument, but it will not condone physical, verbal or symbolic aggression against others. There is already enough violence in the world.
documenta 16 invites those who fall, dance, wail, and rise together.
We share the responsibility of creating in the spirit of respect and in the embrace of mutual protection. Kassel offers a space for study, experimentation and awakening, where artists hold right to expression alongside their artistic creation, allowing us to observe how our affective relationships to symbols erupt into policies and social milieus. documenta sixteen will grow as a dialogic arena for transcultural thought where guests meet on equal footing, creating lines of communication where none existed before. Herein lies our horizon, to form bonds that are needed, and even bonds we did not know we needed.