Unintended Consequences: Withdrawal from Documenta

In 2019, for the first time in the history of the exhibition, an artist collective rather than an individual, a pair of curators, or—as is increasingly common for biennials and other mega-exhibitions—a curatorial team was appointed Artistic Director of the fifteenth edition of documenta. Such decisions are usually made on the recommendation of a Finding Committee, which calls for and assesses proposals. The committee is appointed for each edition by the documenta Supervisory Board following advice from previous Artistic Directors. Chaired by the Mayor of Kassel, the Supervisory Board is made up of local and national officials. Museum directors and curators with extensive international experience constitute the Finding Committee. This double peer review process has, on the whole, served documenta well: its five yearly editions have become the major surveys of international contemporary art, regularly eclipsing its only serious competition, the Venice Biennale, in seriousness although not in glitz. I will explore the following questions: Why choose a collective, and why ruangrupa in particular? What did documenta, this venerable institution, hope to achieve by so conspicuously inviting its own deinstitutionalisation? What have been the outcomes, so far, of this bold experiment?

I offered some responses to the last question in a review written during the first weeks of the exhibition and published by Artlink.¹ I will not rehearse these in detail but will return to them in conclusion. To me, documenta 15 was not only unlike any previous edition I had seen since first visiting in 1997, but it was also unlike most other biennials in that it made no attempt to survey international contemporary art. Instead, visiting it felt a lot like attending a scaled-up version of one of the experimental and performance art festivals that have for several decades been staged in cities in Africa (for example, Dakar) and in Asia (for example, Singapore). Local artists working cooperatively, using available resources to build local and regional exhibition infrastructure, with artworks as spin-offs from this communality—examples of this from many parts of the world were on display for documenta’s ‘global’ audience.

Replatforming Documenta

At the press release event on 22 February 2019, Farid Rakun and Ade Darmawan, representing ruangrupa, made the group’s intentions clear:

We want to create a globally oriented, cooperative, interdisciplinary art and culture platform that will have an impact beyond the 100 days of documenta 15. Our curatorial approach aims at a different community-oriented model of resource usage—economical, but also taking ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations into account. If documenta was launched in 1955 to heal war wounds, why shouldn’t we focus documenta 15 on today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures, and contrast them with partnership-based models that enable people to have a different view of the world.²

These intentions, welcomed by the documenta management, must have seemed just what was needed to restore the exhibition’s place as the most innovative, far-sighted and consequential of the mega-exhibitions, a position reached by the editions led by Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor in 1997 and 2002, and arguably matched by Caroline Christov-Bakargiev’s edition in 2012. More generally, they reflect values that had become driving aspirations within international contemporary art, as well as the cooperative mode now widely used for their realisation.

The Finding Committee for documenta 15 consisted of Ute Meta Bauer, founding director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Amar Kanwar, artist, filmmaker, New Delhi; Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, London; Gabi Ngcobo, Curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of The Showroom, London; Philippe Pirotte, professor at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule Frankfurt am Main; and Jochen Volz, director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. That the Committee shared the values articulated by ruangrupa, and valued their operative mode, is evident in the way they spelt out the reasons for their unanimous decision:

We have appointed ruangrupa because they have demonstrated the ability to appeal to various communities, including groups that go beyond pure art audiences, and to promote local commitment and participation. Their curatorial approach is based on an international network of local community-based art organizations. We are eager to see how ruangrupa will develop a concrete project for and from Kassel. At a time when innovative strength particularly stems from independent organizations active on the community level, it seems only logical to offer this collective approach a platform with documenta.³

Several previous editions of documenta had experimented with countering its Eurocentric bias, not simply by including works by artists from the global south but also by making major changes to its structure as a survey exhibition. Among these were Enwezor’s four discursive platforms in Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos, before arriving at the exhibition in Kassel; Bakargiev’s incorporation of Kabul; and Adam Szymczyk’s attempt, for documenta 14, to co-locate the entire exhibition between Athens and Kassel. Each of these moves attracted controversy, including protests from those resenting the obligation to decolonise themselves and from those objecting to having their own liberation thrust upon them. But each edition, arguably, to one or another degree, and in useful ways, renovated the host institution, innovated within the biennial form, responded to major changes in international contemporary art, and advanced the work of decolonisation within world cultures—including, however imperfectly, those of its partner locales.⁴

Appointing ruangrupa as the Artistic Director of documenta 15 was a major step further down this ever-widening path. It was a step into the global south. It was a further step to choose an Artistic Director—or, in this case, a directorate—to work not in a partnership with a European or even North Atlantic co-director, but as fully responsible for the curatorial concept and for the oversight of its execution (with the usual assistance of the local Artistic Team). Yet further, it was a step into Asia, into Southeast Asia, a zone where the making of contemporary art and its curation has in recent decades taken on some distinctive forms. Not least, emphasising hands-on, shared building up of basic arts infrastructure in societies where contemporary art is mostly an elite interest, is regarded with indifference by the majority and, in several states, with suspicion by authorities. In such circumstances, cooperation rules—at least, for a time—because many hands are needed to create educational opportunities, exhibition spaces, open markets, and interpretive frameworks; that is, the conditions for artmaking itself to become possible and sustainable. These endeavours were also responses, for and against, to the social consequences of the succession of economic booms experienced in the region, from Japan in the 1950s through to the 1970s, South Korea since the 1960s, China since the 1980s, the ‘Tiger Cub’ boom in Southeast Asia since the 1990s, and India since the 1990s.

Art Spaces Asia: A New Paradigm?

In 2003, drawing on what anarchist activist and poet Hakim Bey names ‘temporary autonomous zones’, curator Hou Hanru identified a significant shift across Asia and the Pacific in the years around 2000: the eruption of ‘self-organized alternative spaces run by the art community’:

These organizations are extremely diverse, responding to the specific cultural, economic, and political conditions of their own localities and identifying the need to be different. This new movement, from the very beginning, was born from the process of artists engaging themselves in the creation of new urban spaces and lifestyles in light of the impact of urban expansion—the most essential aspect of Asia-Pacific’s modernization. Almost all self-organized artists’ groups and spaces emerge in cities and evolve in their negotiations for particular positions in the urban life. They are often physically small, flexible, and continuously adapting to the conditions driven by urban development. Alternative spaces such as IT Park (Taipei), Para-site (Hong Kong), Project 304 (Bangkok), Loft (Beijing), About Café (Bangkok), Big Sky Mind (Manila), Plastic Kinetic Worms (Singapore), Loop (Seoul), Pool (Seoul), Cemeti Art House (Jogjakarta), and Ruangrupa (Jakarta) are located in the historic centers of their cities and effectively influence the surrounding communities. Other groups such as Big Tail Elephants (Guangzhou), U-kabat (Bangkok), APA (Kuala Lumpur), and Forum A (Seoul), being more ‘immaterial’, practice urban-guerrilla strategies by occupying temporary spaces in their cities. They all, however, share an interest in new technologies and related cultural strategies as active reactions to the demands of the epoch. Numerous alternative spaces and groups have focused on such a direction. Videotage (Hong Kong) and Movelfund (Manila) are influential bases for experimental video and film production and organizers of multimedia festivals. Project 304 presents the biannual Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. In the meantime, another generation is actively forging the new Asian youth culture and new forms of expression that are deeply rooted in the culture of consumption (advertising, etc.) yet highly critical of this ‘raw reality’. The complex, often contradictory, relations between artists and their social conditions, especially the institutional infrastructure, have led these artists to an understanding of the need to develop different visions and methods of contemporary art creation. This further pushes them to promote different ways of defining contemporary art.⁵

To Hanru, this activity signalled a paradigm shift from Western artworld models to ‘a new paradigm of “institution”: always moving, flexible, changing, and reinventing itself’.⁶

How pervasive has this shift been in Asia? It has, sadly, not occurred in China, however valiantly artist-activists have struggled to bring it about in several cities across the country.⁷ With the evident exception of Aotearoa New Zealand, even today arts infrastructure in the South Pacific is so nascent that none could expect it to generate the seeds of a world-wide transformation. Yet Hanru was suggesting that Southeast and South Asia may be home to a different story, and he lists several examples of art spaces that had undoubtably made a vital contribution to art and curatorial practice in the region, with impacts throughout the international visual arts exhibitionary complex. Many more could be added to his list, not least Sàn Art and The Factory Contemporary Art Centre in Ho Chi Minh City, local artist-led initiatives with, Zoe Butt argues, friendship as their core component.⁸

Nongkrong As Method

By 2010, it was obvious to several observers that Jakarta-based ruangrupa stood out amidst this cohort. It introduces itself as a contemporary art organisation ‘founded in Jakarta in 2000 by a group of artists… As a non-profit organization, ruangrupa consistently advances artistic ideas in both an urban context and within culture at large through exhibitions, festivals, art laboratories, workshops, research, and by publishing books, magazines and online journals’.⁹ The name ruangrupa combines the Indonesian words ruang, meaning ‘place’ or ‘a space’ with rupa, ‘appearance’ or ‘visualisation’, thus ‘visual space’, or place for making people, things, and ideas visible. It was founded by Ade Darmawan, Hafiz, Ronny Agustinus, Oky Arfie Hutabarat, Lilia Nursita, and Rithmi, all graduates of Jakarta’s leading art schools and from the Royal Academy in Amsterdam. They sought to develop a visual arts practice that would share forms of life with those of the youth culture that exploded during the period of Reformasi that followed the collapse of the Suharto ‘New Order’ regime in 1998. New music, and a commitment to forging new ways of living in the massive financial and administrative conurbation that is Jakarta, as distinct from the (relatively) quieter cultural centres of Bandung and Jogjakarta, were seeds that continue to be fundamental to their ongoing practice.

For the most part, ruangrupa also keeps a resolute distance from the commercial art scene in Jakarta, but taps grant support from anywhere and everywhere, with an indifferent lack of discrimination, on the presumption of its own incorruptibility. Communality, informality, and open, supportive relationships are at the core of ruangrupa practice. The cohort of between twenty and thirty members has expanded beyond visual artists and musicians to include architects, urban planners, writers, and people with training in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines who are seeking non-academic ways of working. The goal continues to be to arrive at all policy and practical decisions collectively, through informal conversational processes (ngobrol, ‘chatting’). From the beginning there has also been the expectation that group members would pursue individual art practices, and other interests of all kinds, in parallel to their contributions to the collective. Openness, inclusivity, nothing is ruled out. A laid-back tone prevails, made possible by a consistently frank self-assessment of strengths and weakness by the principal figures and the group as they respond to constantly changing circumstances. Consensus rules, differences are submerged; those who wish to live and work otherwise just walk away. Ruangrupa’s highly localist nongkrong also makes them practiced at keeping the conflicts of Indonesian public politics at a distance.

Their suburban location is relevant here. Activities were initially centred on a rented house in a southern suburb of the city, but have since clustered in a compound there, owned by the group, that is open to all 24/7. This is the main site of collective practice, and the visible manifestation of the group’s character. As Thomas J. Berghuis explains,

Merging the two terms for the visual and for space realizes the close interdependence in which the appearance of an actual space generates a three-dimensional realm in which objects transpire and events occur, and whereby its (outward) appearance as a space is at once realized through visual means. Since its founding, ruangrupa has been expanding the space and the audience for art in Jakarta, centred on initiatives of artists, designers, architects and writers, and had also been generating visual formations that deliberately infuse shared artistic practices with communal experiences of culture, society politics and everyday life.¹⁰

The compound works as an ongoing visual arts laboratory in a set of flexible (and overloaded) exhibition spaces, hosting workshops, places for research and for producing publications, from T-shirts to artists’ books, and a shop to sell them in. There is a strong program of residencies for local artists, and those visiting from elsewhere in Indonesia or abroad. Its main work in recent years has been as a training camp for artists-activists who aim to establish similar organisations in their own localities.

Admitting that none of the founders ‘thought that this contemporary art organization would have a lasting existence’, ruangrupa members were pleased when the National Gallery of Indonesia staged an exhibition acknowledging the group’s tenth anniversary.¹¹ In 2015, it published a small buklet that reviewed fifteen years of work in careful and frank terms. It noted that the founders, ‘entering the ages of forties and mid-thirties’, were becoming ‘overwhelmed’ by the demands of running their own careers plus that of the collective; whereas new members, with new ideas, found themselves faced with older members who believed that their hard-won founding ideas were already undergoing sufficient challenge, from themselves in particular. The group adopted a structural solution. The founding members came to constitute ‘a kind of collective board’, tasked with ‘building networks, collaborating with other institutions, conducting researches, raising funds, while maintaining their routine as partners in discussion to maintain the quality of programs from the inside’.¹² Newer members have become directors of revamped divisions and programs. The divisions are mainly managerial. The programs, each with a specified leader, and occupying a space within the compound, include Artlab, OK. Video, Jakarta 32 °C (a biannual forum and exhibition of art by Jakarta students), RURU gallery (a space for emerging artists), and Karbon, a journal with seven printed editions 2000 to 2006, online since 2009. Indicative of the energies at ruangrupa are the several spin-offs from these programs. These include RURU Shop, which sells oddities made by artist members, RURURadio, on online ‘contemporary radio with no frequency’, and RRREC, an annual alternative music festival. As David Teh puts it, ‘To profile ruangrupa is to describe an event: time-based, immediate and loosely structured; with a sense of purpose, yet more celebratory than agonistic’—in a phrase, ‘Karaoke as Method’.¹³

Finally, and after much discussion, in 2015 ruangrupa started an art school, a non-degree granting educational initiative to

generate artists, curators, managers, producers, writers—or anything in between. Institut ruangrupa (Ir.) will select participants for approximately two years program and offer methods that emphasize on knowledge production in order to shape practitioners who–with the city as their laboratory–utilize ruangrupa as a practice and discussion vehicle; teaches various forms of art, social, political, cultural knowledge required to create tough and sensitive art workers.¹⁴

Since then, this has been renamed Gudskul (‘good school’), describing itself as a ‘collective study and contemporary art ecosystem’.¹⁵ This is an open-ended, shared enterprise in which ruangrupa engages as a matter of course. It also offers more formal short courses in a variety of practical pursuits, from ‘How to Make your Own Photobook’, ‘How to Create and Publish Your Own Comics’ through to ‘Visual Branding’ and video and music courses. Fees are determined by the participants according to their capacity to pay.¹⁶ Gudskul has become a major focus of the collective’s activities in Jakarta, paralleling exhibition-making and curating, which have been present from the beginning, and are now, along with educating, the other major driver of the enterprise.

The members of ruangrupa work in multiple mediums, and participate in a wide range of external venues, from local street festivals through to national ones, such as the Jakarta International Video Festival, to international biennials, such as Istanbul in 2005, where Benyamin Sueb, a persona representing lower middle-class identity in Jakarta, was matched with Kema Sunal, a parallel identity in Turkey. For the 7th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 2012, ruangrupa curated an archival installation, THE KUDA: The Untold Story of Indonesian Underground Music in the 70s, revisiting one of its roots. Since then, ruangrupa has participated in the Singapore Biennale (2011); the São Paulo Biennial (2014); the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya (2016); the first edition in 2017 of Cosmopolis, a biennial platform showcasing research-based art practices at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Sharjah Biennial (2019).

As a collective, it has actively participated in the recent trend of artists and groups (such as the New Delhi-based RAQs Media Collective) acting as curators of museum exhibitions and of biennials. In 2016, under the theme ‘transACTION’, it curated the Contemporary Art Exhibition SONSBEEK, creating a city-wide display of public art in Arnhem. An acute commentator, David Teh contrasts ruangrupa’s curatorial style with that more typical of Indonesian curators of the current generation, who are for the most part harried servants of a speculative art market in thrall to the latest developments in international contemporary art: ‘Ruangrupa and its collaborators stand out here for having kept alive a parallel world for historically-informed—if not always art historically informed—ways of working… in which modernity and nation still matter, and instrumentality is not (yet) the arch-enemy of art’.¹⁷ In calling attention to ruangrupa’s frequent revisiting of its moment of origination, he is balking at Berghuis’s celebration of ruangrupa as representing the kind of ‘art to come’ called for by world contemporaneity. To be fair, Berghuis was writing before ruangrupa members focused so concretely on curating international exhibitions. Curating became as central to ruangrupa’s international activity as Gudskul is to its local focus. Prior to documenta 15, its strength in curating appeared most clearly in its archival, historical installations, such as THE KUDA and its editions of the Jakarta video festival. These curatorial interventions outshone the showing of individual works of art by members in group or individual exhibitions. But the mix was a work in progress, as it is for all similar organisations.

Contemporary Art Asia

The settings within which contemporary art is made and shown in Asia are much changed since 2003, when Hou Hanru identified a distinctively Asian character in the self-governing spaces in the region and hoped that it might be a paradigm with worldwide resonance. Even then, however, such initiatives were not unique to Asia: they had a long, much storied history in European avant-gardism and were widespread in many places at the time—not least Australia, where alternative spaces, not-for-profit galleries and artist-run initiatives appeared in the 1970s and have proliferated since. In Asia, these kinds of space are an element within the exhibitionary complexes that have grown in most major cities in the region, and in the networks between them. Their workings are impacted by the rapid growth of many kinds of biennial, of artist districts in Beijing and elsewhere, of clusters of private collector museums in Shanghai and elsewhere, of the sophisticated instrumentalisation of contemporary art by Singapore as part of its efforts to become a subregional centre, and the creation of cultural hubs such as the West Kowloon Cultural District, anchored by M+. Asian nation states have developed a complex and constantly variable relationship to contemporary art: at times profoundly suspicious of its subversive potential, at others welcoming of its capacity to confer cultural status. Censorship and celebration seem handmaidens; the spectrum between them is regularly on display.

In these circumstances, it is remarkable that several of the spaces run by arts activist collectives have maintained their spirit, and practice, as temporary autonomous zones for more than twenty years, cycling through a few generations of committed artists, activists, curators, and supporters of many kinds, while being able to maintain their inspiration and continue to inspire others. Strong networks have developed between such places throughout the region and in other regions elsewhere. The Asia Art Archive, based in Hong Kong and with a hub in New York, has paid close attention to these activities. They are showcased in major museums, such as the Mori Art Museum under Mami Kataoka, who directs its National Center for Art Research. A key component of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale directed by Maria Lind was the gatherings of the Intra-School, an international network of over one hundred mostly small-scale contemporary art organisations. Herself a key organiser of Europe-wide and continent-spanning not-for-profit art centres, Lind funded this gathering by appointing all attendees as Biennale Fellows.¹⁸

Such developments suggest that these kinds of Southeast and South Asian deinstitutionalisation have the capacity to keep on renewing, transforming and adapting themselves—in some places, at least, for certain periods, but overall, impressively enough, given the odds against them. What might happen if this energy were imported to Europe, not to accommodate a diaspora living there but to show how critical, questioning, reflective art is being made today in the rest of the world? Such thoughts were perhaps in the minds of the Finding Committee—not least Ute Meta Bauer, member of Enwezor’s curatorial team in 2002 and curator of the 17th Istanbul Biennial in 2022, who has worked extensively in the region from her base in Singapore since 2013. She and the other members—such as Indian video artist Anwar Kanwar; Dutch museum director Charles Esche, who co-curated the 2002 Gwangju Biennale with Hanru; Belgian curator Phillipe Pirotte, active as director or co-director of biennials in Jakarta and Busan, and as curator of exhibitions in Singapore—would readily see that ruangrupa was the group most likely to bring their version of this vision to Kassel, be able to negotiate the local conditions, and to send a challenging yet positive message about contemporary art and its futures to documenta’s substantial national and international audiences.¹⁹ Would nongkrong be exportable? Could a collation of similarly inspired collectives from around the world form a constellation of good faith in Kassel between 18 June and 25 September 2022? How would they cope with the artistic, cultural, and political politics that attend every mega-exhibition, not least the most consequential of them all?

Kassel 2022: Aspirations, Realities

On the ground at Kassel, critiques of ‘today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures’—as per ruangrupa’s statement of intent—were indeed explicit or implicit in most venues. Yet they were framed and, in most cases, subsumed, by the other value embodied in the statement, the ‘partnership-based models that enable people to have a different view of the world’. Signs and places of welcome were everywhere: at the ticketing offices, at each venue, and at each event there were spaces to hang out, chill, eat, drink, chat—in a word, nongkrong as method. The mood was set by ruangrupa’s decision to disperse usable funds (the overall budget for this edition was €42.2 million), and to expand curatorial responsibility way beyond their own already quite large group through layers of invitation to like-minded artists, activists and friends, by some counts 1,400 in all. The constant presence of changing members of this cohort at each venue and throughout the city defined the distinctive energy of this edition.

Few artworks were presented as singularities. Instead, each was shown as an element in an ensemble, a component within a group show that documented past efforts and displayed ongoing activity. Some installations underwent reconstruction throughout the duration, while others invited visitor participation. This was true of ruangrupa’s own installations in the main rooms of the Fridericianum. The main ground floor galleries to the left of the entrance foyer were converted into a child-care centre (RURU KIDS), while those to the right introduced ruangrupa itself, mainly through wall diagrams of its organisational formlessness, videos explaining these practices, and charts of Gudskul’s friendship based nongkrong Curricula. The central rotunda was a teaching/learning space run by the Berlin-based, migrant support group *foundationClass*collective.

The hopes of the Finding Committee that the collective’s track record of being able ‘to appeal to various communities, including groups that go beyond pure art audiences, and to promote local commitment and participation’, would, in Kassel, lead to an exhibition that embodied the ‘innovative strength [which, worldwide today,] particularly stems from independent organizations active on the community level’, were only partially realised.²⁰ The Question of Funding, an affiliation of Palestinian collectives, came to Kassel to create AKA, the first collective network of artists to be formed in the city. Their own installation featured several works by Palestinian artist collectives from both Gaza and the West Bank, working side by side in ways they cannot do at home. But the installation was vandalised by unknown assistants in the weeks before the exhibition opened. A brief outcry occurred.²¹

At other venues, there were strong archival exhibitions evoking details of recent struggles for liberation from authoritarian and colonial rule by the Asia Art Archive; Archives de luttes des femmes en Algérie; The Black Archives; Komîna Fîlm a Rojava; Siwa Platforme—L’Economat at Redeyef; and Subversive Film, Ramallah and Brussels. Outstanding among the many installations showing works by artists’ collectives were those by Wajuku Art Project, Nairobi; Foundation Festival sur le Niger; Trampoline House, Copenhagen; Artis Rezistans, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; INLAND, Spain, now Europe; Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, Chengdu; and FAFSWAG, Pacific Islands.²²

The most directly confrontational political statements were Richard Bell’s Tent Embassy; the posters, banners and protest figures of Taring Padi; and the critique by the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), founded by the implacable Tania Bruguera, of the Cuban government’s ongoing and worsening suppression of artistic freedom. The most striking visualisations were Barcelona-based Mexican artist Erick Beltrán’s Manifold, shown in the temporary exhibition spaces of the Museum for Sepulchral Culture, Kassel. He began his project by working with a team of researchers from the University of Kassel to ask residents to describe the images that arise when they think about power. Hanging in the transparent spaces suspended inside the displays of sepulchres, gravestones, and funeral paraphernalia on the lower floors of this museum, Beltrán’s banners transformed the reported conceptualisations into powerful infographics, most using the manifold as the guiding visual metaphor. This generality of conceptualisation, and the high production values of the display, stood apart from the DIY materials and the more direct person-to-person-in-a-group orientation of most of the works in the exhibition.

Kassel 2022: Injustice

In my Artlink review, I discussed at some length the controversy triggered by Taring Padi’s canvas banner The People’s Justice, made originally for the Adelaide Festival in 2002. Ruangrupa, inheritors of this Jogjakarta-based group’s decades of artistic radicalism, installed the banner on the central square outside the Fridericianum, near Bell’s Tent Embassy, foregrounding these two overt political statements from the South Asian region as the primary announcement of the exhibition’s curatorial intent. Taring Padi’s committedly populist house style is drawn from German Expressionist graphics, Soviet Socialist Realism, Mexican Muralism, Taller Experimental de Gráfica de la Habana, and similar artistic sources. Using ‘art as a tool for political expression and education for all’, Taring Padi paintings, posters, protest signs, and publications portray lucid historic and current narratives.²³ Filled with specific, local imagery and readily recognisable figures, including several stereotypes, they chronicle particular struggles for ‘the sovereignty of the people’, identifying enemies, celebrating heroes, and pointing to the eventual victory of the people united.²⁴

Three days after the opening, someone noticed an anti-Semitic image within the hundreds of figures that swarm within The People’s Justice. Taring Padi, ruangrupa, and the Artistic Team within the documenta organisation that worked with them at Kassel apologised for their mistake and removed the painting.²⁵ While I abhor the use of anti-Semitic imagery, as with any other racial stereotyping—in all contexts, including in this painting and others by the group—I did not support its removal from the exhibition. It was easy for me to say, a few days later, that this work would have been better shown, fully contextualised, in the well-curated, twenty-year survey of the group’s work at Hellenbad Ost, a repurposed bathing house in a nearby suburb. And that the mural-sized painting made by Taring Padi for this documenta, Sekarang Mereka, Besok Kita (Today they’ve come for them, tomorrow they come for us), 2021—which makes similar political points without the stereotyping, without the anti-Semitism, of the earlier work—could have been shown on the front lawn. Liberal solutions are ready to hand when you are not in the engine room.

There is no doubt that the controversy has grossly distorted the reception of the exhibition, especially in national and international news media and in the art professional press. It dominated media coverage from that moment on, standing in for the exhibition as a whole for many who did not visit, perhaps discouraging some from coming, and contaminating the experience of some who did visit. ‘Antisementa’ became a meme. Calls by certain politicians to close the exhibition were opposed by the documenta curatorial team, soon costing its director, Sabine Schormann, her job. In another act of self-protection, the Supervisory Board established a ‘scientific committee’ which quickly, on 1 August, announced its preliminary finding, notably that ‘the serious problems of documenta fifteen consist not only in the presentation of isolated works with anti-Semitic imagery and statements, but also in a curatorial and organisational structural environment that allowed an anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel mood to prevail’.²⁶ This goes further than suggestions that ruangrupa’s consensual model was too casual, too inclusive, too ‘politically correct’ to prevent instances of anti-Semitism. It falsely accuses ruangrupa, and the documenta curators, of staging an anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel exhibition. Little in ruangrupa’s experience of sustained nongkrong would have prepared them for this level, and density, of hysterical bad faith.

In a statement entitled ‘We are angry, we are sad, we are tired, we are united’, ruangrupa responded on the same day with a brilliant dismantling of the overdetermined, ‘metonymic blur’ of the committee’s accusation, insisting instead that

We do not give permission to be defined, inspected, re-colonised by yet another institution. We refuse—and we act upon our refusal—in the same manners of the lumbung, we do it together, affirmatively and poetically. We assert that our lumbung continues while your documenta ends; our solidarity continues while your superiority, arrogance and power games end. From now on, everywhere and for many years ahead, we will be practicing our withdrawal from documenta, and building on the lumbung.²⁷

The Finding Committee expressed their support for ruangrupa, lumbung members, and contributing artists in a statement from 15 September 2022, on these grounds (which, for what it is worth, minus the pluralism, I also support):

We reject both the poison of antisemitism and its current instrumentalization, which is being done to deflect criticism of the 21st century Israeli state and its occupation of Palestinian territory. At the same time, we embrace documenta fifteen’s pluralism and the possibility to hear such a rich diversity of artistic voices from across the world for the first time. We defend the right of artists and their work to rethink, expose, and criticize political formulas and fixed patterns of thought. We believe this right is something to be cherished by those in public life who make exhibitions like documenta possible.²⁸

A danse macabre of unintended consequences, of good intentions upstaged by side effects and swamped by bad faith, is still playing itself out. Ruangrupa’s attempt to heal ‘today’s injuries’ with the balm of loving, open-future partnerships ran into the spectre of certain past injuries arising in a place haunted by its own past (during the Nazi period, Kassel hosted a vast labour camp, and was carpet bombed by the Allies), in a country where their recurrence must be thwarted, at all costs. The act of generosity in foregrounding Taring Padi’s efforts to come to terms with Indonesia’s violent and repressive past (in parallel to the political purpose of the original Tent Embassy and Bell’s reiteration of it) ran into the moral black hole that propels Germany’s unfinished, perhaps irresolvable Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It is a sad irony that ruangrupa’s act of comradeship with another collective inadvertently triggered this contamination of the exhibition’s celebration of precisely this quality (lumbung). Likewise, that their gesture in prioritising, on documenta’s global platform, another Indonesian art activist group should backfire so dramatically. And finally, that a work made, without irony, in a consciously anachronistic style should precipitate a sequence of events that would so damage the exhibition’s substantial achievement in showing what some of the many different ways of making art within the coevality to come—if it does come—might look like.

The Last Documenta or The First Exhibition of the 21st Century?

New York Times critic Jason Farago worried that these developments mean (in the words of the leader writer) that ‘The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition is Over. Maybe Forever,’ and (in his own words) doubted that documenta will ‘ever recover its aim of imagining the whole world in one show’.²⁹ In contrast, Charles Esche, curator and long-term director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, welcomed the ‘lack of utopian or messianic symbols… of art that wants to fix the world or propose a new system of living,’ and was fascinated, challenged, and inspired by art that, instead, ‘looks for how life can survive and thrive in the face of the hostility of a catastrophic economic and social world system’, making d15 feel like ‘one of the first art exhibitions of the 21st century’.³⁰

Neither formulation entirely captures the complexities in play. While ruangrupa certainly refused the top-down overview of the ‘whole world’s’ contemporary art that Farago expects from documentas, they offered instead a lateral lattice of local art practices from many places around the world, with the implication that a ‘whole’ world could be like this. As a claim about the history of exhibitions, Esche’s characterisation ‘one of the first’ is a little loose. Utopic deliverance was hardly the tone at documenta 11; rather, the worldwide contested coexistence of differences was its theme, one dramatically underscored on 9/11. And dOCUMENTA (13) explored the world’s self-wounding. Yet Esche is right to sense that precedents such as these did not place such deep faith in the productive power of locality within our contemporaneous differences when it is pursued as a shared enterprise that is also shareable with others elsewhere with similar commitments.³¹ World picturing, world modelling, world making—imagining their many forms (not their ‘one’ form) is a major task of contemporary art and curating today. Mega-exhibitions showcase these processes. So do many others, according to scale and focus.

The New York Times leader writer was right to hint that the retrogressions precipitated by the anti-Semitism controversy threaten to drag documenta as an exhibition and an institution back into the darkest regions of the previous century, where indeed it has only a zombie future. Such draws to darkness are resurgent today, as distorted remnants, impossible fusions, IEDs: the rise of hard right parties in Europe; Trumpism in the United States; the invasion of Ukraine; the Serbia/Kosovo standoff; repression in Syria and Myanmar; warlords ascendant in parts of Africa; the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, followed by the massive overreaction by the Israeli Defence Forces; as well as larger scale factors such as corporate greenwashing and governments everywhere that sign the climate accords while actually accelerating their fossil fuel extractions—these are just some flashpoints and recurrences in a panorama of clear and present disaster. Esche’s claim is based on his sense that, in such circumstances, ruangrupa and the lumbung participants no longer anticipate a universal, utopic ‘fix’. Rather, they focus on linking with other collectives that are working out ways to survive, co-operatively, within the worldwide disaster zone. Yes, but—to take them at their word—they do so in the spirit, a kind of pragmatic hopefulness, explicit in their curatorial statement: by pursuing ‘a different community-oriented model of resource usage’ that, in contrast to ‘colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures’, would ‘enable people to have a different view of the world’. This, too, is world picturing.

Ruangrupa continues its pursuit of lumbung and its mission to share it. Mega-exhibitions aside, its enterprise will continue to inspire others. As for documenta itself, its defences are on hyperalert, and its carefully calibrated infrastructure is being squeezed to near breaking point. Farago may turn out to be right, but for the worst reasons. With everyone involved being scrutinised for any hint of an association with any anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, or pro-BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) activity—all illegal within Germany—winning international artworld support is becoming increasingly difficult. During November 2023, one member of the newly appointed Finding Committee was pressured by the new documenta management to resign due to his opposition to an event in Mumbai in 2019 that equated Zionism with Hindutva, while another member, an Israeli artist, found her position to be untenable. Within days, the entire Committee resigned.³² Whether another such committee can be viably assembled remains an open question.

On 15 December 2023, a Final Report on the Organisational Development of documenta and Museum Fridericianum gGmbH was published. Prepared by a management consultancy, its proposals aimed to ‘establish effective measures against anti-Semitism and other forms of group-specific hatred while fully protecting artistic freedom, as well as to increase the crisis resilience and future viability of documenta and Museum Fridericianum [g]GmbH’.³³ Two Codes of Conduct, both based on these principles, are proposed: one governing the ongoing institutional management, while a specific Code for each iteration should be drawn up by the ‘Artistic Direction’, including specifics about how its planned exhibition ‘does not violate human dignity’, as required by German Basic Law. Those involved should consult constantly to identify difference and avoid potential conflicts. The consultants emphasised that the appointment of artistic director(s) chosen by their peers and free to exercise independent judgement as to the nature and content of the exhibition was essential to documenta’s ‘top-T1 global brand’. Accordingly, it recommended retaining the Finding Committee, ‘with adjustments’, to appoint the artistic director(s). And that the management should be regularly informed about, but have no call over, the ‘content’ of the exhibition.³⁴ As of April 2024, it remains to be seen just how many of these hands across the chasm recommendations will survive public consultation, in-house review, and local political scrutiny. And whether the artists, collectives, curators, critics, and others who constitute documenta’s core creators and its primary audiences will consent to the rules that will be put in place—not least, boy scout-like Codes of Conduct.

Already, there are other signs of withdrawal from documenta. In December 2023, Manuel Borja-Villel and Vassif Kortun—outstanding curators and, for many years, highly regarded directors of, respectively, the Museo Reina Sophia in Madrid, and SALT, Istanbul—published their ‘Proposal for Documenta 16’. Such provisional documents are not usually made public. In this case the authors, both veterans of many battles against timid self-censorship by institutions and right-wing repression by governments, knew that their ideas had no chance of finding acceptance: ‘We realize that, after d15, the upcoming Documenta faces the danger of a retour à l’ordre. We cannot offer that. However, we offer a project with a choreographed discord’. Echoing Okwui Enwezor in Venice in 2015, they go on to set out three ‘lines of flight’: ‘Terrible Beauty’, ‘Border Thinking’ and a ‘Detaining Strategy’.³⁵

For those looking for signs of hope, a seed for future documentas, and for many more ruangrupas, a hint may be found buried in an earlier report based on extensive questionnaires and released in July 2023: ‘The analysis shows high overall satisfaction among respondents with their visit to the exhibition (mean score of 2.19). In particular, the atmosphere of the exhibition, the principle of communality (lumbung), and the international mix met with high approval ratings’ among the 780,000, predominantly young, visitors.³⁶ Take that, ‘scientific’ committee, control freaks, ideological police, and sceptics. Young people, deinstitutionalised, will never be defeated.

Notes

1 See Terry Smith, ‘Documenta 15: Collectivism and Controversy’, Artlink, 11 July 2022, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4983/documenta-15-2022-collectivism-and-controversy/. I am grateful to the AAANZ reviewers for their improving comments on this essay.

2 See documenta Press release, ‘ruangrupa Selected as Artistic Direction of documenta 15 For the First Time an Artist Collective Curates the International Art Exhibition’, 22 February 2019, https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/2500-ruangrupa-selected-as-artistic-direction-of-documenta-15-for-the-first-time-an-artist-collective-curates-the-international-art-exhibition.

3 Ibid.

4 The most comprehensive and astute accounts of these editions may be found in Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and Documentas: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (London: Wiley, 2016). My views on documenta 11 may be found in Terry Smith, ‘Exhibiting the Postcolonial Constellation’, in Mark Nash, Uta Meta Bauer, and Angelika Nollert, eds., Platform 6, Documenta11 Recently, posted 29 April 2021, at https://www.documenta-platform6.de/exhibiting-the-postcolonial-constellation/#, and on dOCUMENATA(13) in Terry Smith, ‘Ways of World-Exhibiting’, The Exhibitionist 7 (December 2012): 31–37.

5 Hou Hanru, ‘Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State’, in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, ed. Philippe Vergne (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003), 38, http://latitudes.walkerart.org/images/text/hanru_latitudes.pdf. See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). See also Pause: Project 1 (Gwangju Biennale, 2002) and Alternatives: Contemporary Art Spaces in Asia (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2002). For a discussion of the alternative space situation in Hong Kong in 2016, see http://artcentralhongkong.com/2016-program/talks-x-asia-society-the-flexibility-of-the-not-for-profit-art-organization/.

6 Hou, ‘Initiatives, Alternatives’, 38.

7 For a profile as of 2018, see the infographic by Xi Bei, ‘Independent Art and Culture Organizations’, Garibaldi Journal 03 (February 2018), issue title: Differences Blossom: China’s contemporary arts ecology, http://www.theindependentproject.it/garibaldi-journal/independent-art-and-culture-organizations/. Very few of these spaces remain active today, due to attrition caused by state support of commercial businesses in the arts combined with policing of non-commercial, socially active collectives, especially those with ‘foreign’ links, a situation exacerbated by the lengthy COVID-19 lockdowns.

8 See Zoe Butt, ‘The Collective Development of Contemporary Art in Vietnam: A Critical Struggle to Be Independent’, in After Darkness: Art in the Wake of History, ed. Boon Hui Tan and Michelle Yun (New York: Asia Society, 2017); and Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyễn, and Thiền Bảo Lê, ‘Spirit of Friendship: Artist Groups in Vietnam since 1975’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 2, no. 2 (2018): 145–79.

9 See ruangrupa, ‘About’, https://ruangrupa.id/en/about/, and various authors, Yayasan ruangrupa end line report, Center for Development Innovation, Wageningen, 2015, https://edepot.wur.nl/358993. See also Reinaart Vanhoe, Also-Space, From Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking (Eindhoven: Onomatapee, 2016).

10 Thomas J. Berghuis, ‘ruangrupa: What could be “Art to Come’’’, Third Text 25, no. 4 (2011): 402–3.

11 ruangrupa 10th anniversary, DECOMPRESSION #10—Expanding the Space and the Public, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Bandung and Yogjakarta, 2010–2011.

12 ruangrupa, Buklet ruangrupa 2000–2015 (ruangrupa: Jakarta 2015), 14–16, http://ruangrupa.org/15/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/BUKLET_RUANGRUPA-2000-2015_EBOOK-TEXT-IN-EN.pdf.

13 David Teh, ‘Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship’, Afterall 30, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 112–4. Much of the spirit of ruangrupa is captured in their 80-page pamphlet, siasat (strategy), a short tactical guide for artist run initiatives, published in 2011.

14 ruangrupa, Buklet ruangrupa 2000–2015, 19.

15 Gudskul, ‘About’, https://gudskul.art/en/about/.

16 For details, see https://gudskul.art.

17 Teh, ‘Who Cares a Lot?’, 116–17.

18 See ‘11th Gwangju Biennale 2016: The Eighth Climate (What does art do?)’,

http://www.the8thclimate.org.

19 Artworld responses to the appointment are typified in Hili Perlson, ‘Who Are ruangrupa? A Closer Look at Documenta 15’s Artistic Directors’, Frieze, 25 February 2019, https://frieze.com/article/who-are-ruangrupa-closer-look-documenta-15s-artistic-directors .

20 documenta Press release, ‘ruangrupa Selected as Artistic Direction of documenta 15’.

21 On The Question of Funding, see https://www.lumbunggallery.theartists.net/artist/the-question-of-funding#:∼:text=In%20the%20context%20of%20documenta,systems%20based%20on%20blockchain%20technologies. On the vandalism and other attacks, see Louise Steiwer, ‘Documenta Vandalised’, Kunstkritik, 7 June 2022, https://kunstkritikk.com/documenta/.

22 I discuss and illustrate these works and others listed below in the Artlink article mentioned above, note 1.

23 See Taring Padi, ‘About Taring Padi’, https://www.taringpadi.com/?lang=en.

24 Ibid.

25 See ‘Ruangrupa and the Artistic Team on Dismantling People’s Justice’, statement released 23 June 2022, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/press-releases/ruangrupa-on-dismantling-peoples-justice-by-taring-padi/; and ‘Statement by Taring Padi on Dismantling of People’s Justice’, released 24 June 2022, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/press-releases/statement-by-taring-padi-on-dismantling-peoples-justice/. The best discussion of many of the issues, informed by interviews with Taring Padi members, is by Melbourne-based scholars Wulan Dirgantoro and Elly Kent, “We need to talk! Art, Offence and Politics at Documenta 15,” new mandala, 29 June 2022, https://www.newmandala.org/we-need-to-talk-art-offence-and-politics-in-documenta-15/.

26 Documenta 15 press release, ‘Shareholders of documenta introduce scientific advisory panel’, 1 August 2022, at https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3039-shareholders-of-documenta-introduce-scientific-advisory-panel.

27 Ruangrupa, ‘We are angry, we are sad, we are tired, we are united’, https://ruangrupa.id/en/2022/09/10/we-are-angry-we-are-sad-we-are-tired-we-are-united/.

28 Statement of the Finding Committee, Documenta 15, 15 September 2022, https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3051-the-statement-of-finding-committee.

29 Jason Farago, “The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever,” The New York Times, 23 September 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/arts/design/documenta-15.html.

30 Charles Esche, ‘Charles Esche About Documenta 15’, Museum of Care, https://museum.care/charles-esche-about-documenta-15/. This text was originally published on Facebook by Charles Esche on 7 August 2022.

31 For my own views on these tendencies in contemporary curating, see Terry Smith, ‘Is De-Institutionalization Renewable?’, in Were It As If: Beyond An Institution That Is, ed. Defne Ayes and Brik van der Pol (Rotterdam: Witte de With Contemporary Art Center, 2017); and Terry Smith, Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (Berlin: Sternberg Press for School of Visual Art, New York, 2021).

32 The chain of press releases, including detailed statements by the members of the Finding Committee, may be found at ‘Finding Committee Resigns’, documenta Press release, 16 November 2023, https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3323-press-release-documenta-16-finding-committee-resigns. Meanwhile, the documenta Institute continued its self-examination in a November 2023 symposium entitled ‘documenta fifteen as a Watershed Moment? Art, Politics, and the Public Sphere’, see https://www.documenta.de/en/press.

33 See https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3335-final-report-of-the-organizational-development-of-documenta-und-museum-fridericianum-ggmbh-now-available. The December 2023 report by Metrum Manangementberatung may be downloaded from this link. The internal management of documenta is to be further refined, with greater oversight from local, state, and federal government.

34 Ibid.

35 Manuel Borja-Villel and Vassif Kortun, ‘Proposal for Documenta 16’, e-flux 141 (December 2023), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/141/580399/proposal-for-documenta-16/.

36 See documenta 15 Evaluation, press release, 12 July, 2023, https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3241-press-release-great-appeal-for-young-people-and-long-visitor-stays-documenta-presents-visitor-surveys-on-documenta-fifteen-sustainability-survey-also-conducted-for-the-first-time.