Documenta 15

This year documenta 15 is directed by ruangrupa, a collective of ten artists and creatives from Jakarta, Indonesia.
The intention was to create a collaborative and interdisciplinary global art and culture platform that remains effective even after the 100 days of documenta 15. Their curatorial approach aims at a different kind of collaborative model of resource utilisation, in terms of economics but also of ideas, knowledge, programmes and innovations, which takes inspiration from the “lumbung” (the Indonesian word for a collectively governed rice barn, where the gathered harvest is stored for the common good of the community).

Through the framework of documenta 15, the art team ruangrupa calls upon collectives, organisations and institutions from all over the world to come together and develop “lumbung”. Each members donates and receives different resources, such as time, space, money, knowledge, care and art in order to create new models of regeneration, education and economy in the art world as well.

Now in its 15th year, ‘documenta’ once again has more exhibition venues and an exorbitant number of artists, chosen by ruangrupa. The artistic groups invited by the collective number fourteen and are made up of multiple participants who, in turn, have invited several other colleagues, in perfect accordance with the lumbung principle. It is estimated that there are ultimately over a thousand artists.

This is a vivid incursion of artists from the South and East into an event that tended to take it for granted that the Western art world represented the entire art world, revealing how different the conditions of art and cultural life are outside the richer art centres of the West.

The exhibition spaces are also growing: in addition to the traditional Fridericianum, documenta Halle, Hotel Hessenland and Ottoneum, more unusual venues have been dedicated to the exhibition, such as a boathouse, a 16th century defence fort, a church, a bridge and a disused swimming pool. The constant, however, remains the strongly communal character of the projects: from various workshops and talks involving visitors of all ages to projects focusing on alternative micro-economics to bio-cultivation, gender issues and decolonisation, and touching on politics and civil rights.

This new approach that focuses on the concept of sharing and disrupts the curating system did not convince art world professionals who found Documenta 15 confusing and too crowded.