documenta 14: Neue Galerie

Artists: Zainul Abedin, Danai Anesiadou, Sammy Baloji, Ernst Barlach, Samuel Beckett, Benin bronzes, Sokol Beqiri, Chittaprosad, Arnold Bode, Lorenza Böttner, Geta Brătescu, Marcel Broodthaers, Lucius Burckhardt, Cornelius Cardew, Agim Çavdarbasha, Vija Celmins, Le code noir, Gustave Courbet, Yael Davids, Maya Deren, Maria Eichhorn, Hans Eijkelboom, Conrad Felixmüller, Pavel Filonov, Gandhara Sculptures, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Marina Gioti, Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi, Tomislav Gotovac, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Ludwig Emil Grimm, Cornelia Gurlitt, Louis Gurlitt, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou, Theodor Heuss, Edi Hila, Karl Hofer, Ralph Hotere, Albert Jaern, Sunil Janah, Alexander Kalderach, Amar Kanwar, Leo von Klenze, Louis Kolitz, Katalin Ladik, Maria Lai, Yves Laloy, Valery Pavlovich Lamakh, Karl Leyhausen, Max Liebermann, George Maciunas, Mikhail Matyushin, Tina Modotti, Otobong Nkanga, André Pierre, Dimitris Pikionis, Pope.L, Postcommodity, R. H. Quaytman, Hasan Reçi, Gerhard Richter, W. Richter, Erna Rosenstein, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Marilou Schultz, David Schutter, Baldugiin Sharav, Nilima Sheikh, Amrita Sher-Gil, Vadim Sidur, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, K. G. Subramanyan, Władysław Strzemiński, Alina Szapocznikow, Piotr Uklański, Cecilia Vicuña, Antonio Vidal, Albert Weisgerber, Elisabeth Wild, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Fritz Winter, Andrzej Wróblewski, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Androniqi Zengo Antoniu, Sergio Zevallos, Pierre Zucca

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, Neue Galerie, 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

Housing the Museumlandschaft Hessen-Kassel’s collection of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art, the Neue Galerie has been an important venue in a number of previous editions of documenta. Nevertheless, documenta 14 is the first to inhabit the building in its entirety—which is fitting, perhaps, for an exhibition so self-conscious of its history, and of the broader historical forces that made the very documenta project possible. The museum’s realization in 1877 coincided with the heady early days of the German empire. Its phalanx of eight marble Länderfiguren in particular—allegorical female figures representing the eight traditional “nations of art”: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and England—speaks to the entanglement of nationhood, institution building, and cultural politics in this triumphant moment so soon after modern Germany’s emergence from the Franco-Prussian War.

Questions of nationhood and belonging, but also of dispersal and loss, weave a loose meshwork throughout the Neue Galerie, which effectively operates as the site of documenta 14’s memory, the primary seat of its historical consciousness. This is where the legacy of Arnold Bode, documenta’s founder in 1955, is invoked and debated—as a local avant-garde artist in dialogue with companions from his prewar years on the one hand, in the context of the Marshall Plan–financed recovery of postwar Germany on the other. And this is where that legacy is juxtaposed with geopolitical events such as the Bandung Conference of 1955, and key documents of empire, such as the infamous Code Noir, defining the legal conditions of slavery and exercise of religion in the French colonial empire, issued under Louis XIV in 1685. A quintessential postwar project, documenta reflects here on the long shadow cast by European colonialism, reaching its peak in the singular experience of World War II. Through the prism of the tangled, thorny story of the Gurlitt estate—the “affair” surrounding the private art collection of what was once one of Nazi Germany’s leading art dealers, discovered only in 2012—a larger history of concealment and manipulation of historical memory is addressed. Positing this story as one of the Neue Galerie’s primary organizing principles recasts the question of art’s relationship to the trauma of war or of art produced under conditions of totalitarian control; the museum’s relationship to the history of colonial conquest; the question of looting, ownership, and dispossession; and the all-consuming challenge of art’s entanglement in the realm of economy.

Sokol Beqiri, Pa titull (Untitled, 1997), Acrylic on berboard

Maria Eichhorn, Website Rose Valland Institute, 2017, Unlawfully Acquired Books from Jewish Ownership

Fritz Winter, Aus der Folge (From the sequence), 1954, Oil on board

Arnold Bode, Das schöne Land (The Beautiful Landscape), 1958, Oil on canvas

Karl Leyhausen, The intelletual, 1930, Oil on canvas

Karl Leyhausen, Studio with five standing and one sitting female nudes; verso: Beach life, 1920-1931, Colored chalk, watercolor on cardboard

Gerhard Richter, Portrait of Arnold Bode, 1964, Oil on canvas

Lucius Burckhardt, Landscape-theoretical watercolors, 1970-1995, Watercolor on paper

Leo Von Klenze, Plan for the new city of Athens, 1833, with Eduard Schaubert, Ink on paper

Alexander Kalderach, The Parthenon, 1939, Oil on canvas

Conrad Felixmüller, Portrait of Franz Pfemfert, Oil on canvas

Cornelia Gurlitt, Seventeen works on paper, 1914, 1917, 1918, N.D.

Cornelia Gurlitt, Books of Love. Humor, 1914, Lithograph

Erna Rosenstein, Dawn (Portrai of the artist’s father), 1979, Oil on canvas

Erna Rosenstein, Night, 1993, Oil on wood

Max Liebermann, Rider on the beach, 1908, Oil on canvas

Lorenza Böttner, Untitled, 1985, Pastel on paper, foot painting

Ludwig Emil Grimm, Two Mulattoes, Studies of Heads, 1815, Graphite on paper

The Black Code or collection of rules that have been passed so far: regarding government, administration of justice, police, the discipline & trace of Negros in the French colonies and the councils and companies established for these matters, 1742

Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-portrait as Tahitian, 1934, Oil on canvas

André Pierre, Mystical treatment of Erzuli by Agoue, late 1960s-early 1970s, oil on board

Amrita Sher-Gil, Red Clay Elephant, 1938, Oil on canvas

K.G. Subramanyan, Anatomy Lesson, 2018, Terracota Reliefs

Head of a Fasting Buddha (second-third century CE)

K.G. Subramanyan, Anatomy Lesson, 2018, Acrylic on canvas

Karl Hofer, Man among ruins, 1937, Oil on Canvas

Chittaprosad, Halisahar, Chittagong, 1944, Ink on paper

Siddhartatha Gautama ends his fasting (second-third century CE)

Władysław Strzemiński, From the series “Cheap as Mud”, 1944, Graphite on paper

Andrzej Wróblewski, Mourning News I-IV, 1953

Jahângîr-Album, Portraits in a landscape: Akbar, unknown man, Ihtiman Han, Kisaw Das, ca. 1600, Etching, ink and gold

Lorenza Böttner, Untitled, 1984, Mural, foot paiting

Amar Kanwar, Letter 5 (Such a Morning), 2017, Six-channel digital video installation, black and white, silent, projected onto handmade paper

Sergio Zevallos, A War Machine, 2017, Installation and performance, materials, duration, and dimensions variable

Pélagie Gbaguidi, The Missing Link. Discolonisation Education by Mrs Smiling Stone, 2017, School desks, photographs, glassine paper sheets, drawing with colored pencil, earth, and lipstick on paper, printed and painted notebooks, digital videos, music recording, hand puppets and marionette, broken ceramics from Kassel, and various toys

Benin Bronzes (eighteeth and nineteenth century)

Sammy Baloji, Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, 2017

Yael Davids, A Reading That Loves–A Physical Act, 2017, Installation with tempered glass, armored glass, wood, rope, and facsimiles of works on paper by Cornelia Gurlitt