↳ Exhibitions

documenta 14: Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof)

July 31, 2017

Artists: Michel Auder, Nikhil Chopra, iQhiya, Zafos Xagoraris

Exhibition title: documenta 14: Learning from Athens

Artistic Director: Adam Szymczyk

Curated by: Adam Szymczyk, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Hendrik Folkerts, Candice Hopkins, Hila Peleg, Dieter Roelstraete, Monika Szewczyk

Venue: documenta 14, Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof), Kassel, Germany

Date: June 10 – September 17, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and documenta 14, all photos by Art Viewer

documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station) saw its last train pass through in 2005 after nearly forty years of service. It had opened in 1968, the year of documenta founder Arnold Bode’s fourth and last documenta, to accommodate the increasing local train traffic to and from Kassel. The lower level suggests a point of transit—in this case, of artworks that have perhaps just arrived or are about to depart. The upper level, a former shopping arcade with the remains of a vandalized Kassel city plan rendered in colored glass by Dieter von Andrian (1925–1992), also functions as a threshold, across which the notion of learning and education is found to be continuously and necessarily in flux. Though a sense of desolation tinges the underground space, there is, literally, a light at the end of the tunnel: when emerging, visitors soon arrive at the main documenta 14 venues in Kassel’s Nordstadt.