documenta 14: Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost)

Artists: Rasheed Araeen, Roger Bernat, Ross Birrell, Ulises Carrión, Moyra Davey, Theo Eshetu, Daniel García Andújar, Beatriz González, Irena Haiduk, Maria Hassabi, Edi Hila, Gordon Hookey, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Joar Nango, Otobong Nkanga, Dan Peterman, Arin Rungjang, Máret Ánne Sara, Ahlam Shibli, Algirdas Šeškus, The Society of Friends of Halit, Tracey Rose, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Ulrich Wüst, Artur Żmijewski

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 Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), 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

The brutalist Neue Hauptpost, renamed the Neue Neue Galerie by documenta 14, was inaugurated in 1975 as Kassel’s main post office and mail distribution center. In the wake of the partial privatization and digitization of mail services, it has been largely left vacant. The building appears as a site of post-Fordist labor, one that directly marks the impact of virtualization on the service sector of economic production, its empty spaces serving as a testament to the final stages of a bygone economy. Today, its architectural body is home to a combination of public services, such as the City Department of Roads and Transportation and Hephata Diakonie (an evangelical organization committed to youth support and social rehabilitation), as well as private entities—the gym chain McFit, located directly on top of documenta 14’s main exhibition.

Echoing and reconfiguring the old post office as a nexus of distribution, the artists featured here work with the axes between Kassel and Athens as lines of departure and arrival. The art on view explores the labor of dissemination—by mail, on horseback, through bodies or rituals. The concept of redistribution broadens to encompass larger questions about the production of history, of how certain political conditions form a canon that in turn produces certain types of artistic labor. Many of the artworks featured in the main hall, on the mezzanine, and on the top floor (which once served as an employee canteen and rest area) generate critical ideas about intersections in history, articulating the site as a continuously evolving and dissolving heterotopia.

Gordon Hookey, Murriland!, 2017, Oil on linen and mural

Rasheed Araeen, The Reading Room, 2016-2017, steel and glass tables, wooden stools, and copies of Third Text journal, acrylic on canvas

Beatriz González, Telón de la móvil y cambiante naturaleza (Drop Curtain of Mobile and Changing Nature), 1978, Acrylic on canvas

Algirdas Šeškus, Photographs, 1975-1985, Approx. sixty gelatin silver prints

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, Curtain made of reindeer skulls and metal wire

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, Vitrine containing excerpts from and conclusions of the first and second trial of Jovsset Ante Iversen Sara versus Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food regarding the Norwegian Federal Government’s forced cull of Sámi reindeer herds

Ahlam Shibli, Heimat, Nordhessen, Germany, 2016-2017, Series of fifty-three photographs, chromogenic prints

Arin Rungjang, 246247596248914102516…And then there were none (Democracy Monument), 2017, Wood and brass sculpture

Arin Rungjang, 246247596248914102516…And then there were none (Prasat Chuthin book replica), 2017, Watercolor and graphite on paper

Arin Rungjang, 246247596248914102516…And then there were none (Prasat Chuthin), 2017, Oil on canvas

Arin Rungjang, 246247596248914102516…And then there were none (Nao Chuthin), 2017, Oil on canvas

Arin Rungjang, 246247596248914102516…And then there were none, 2017, One-channel digital video installation, color, sound, 30min.

Maria Hassabi, Staging: Lighting Wall #2, 2017, High heat acrylic paint, 18 Coyo 54 x 3S Warm White LED Par lights, Composer: Marina Rosenfeld, Sound Design: Stavros Gasparatos

SPOT_THE_SILENCE, Sequences-Memory-Change, 2017, Digital video, color, sound

Joar Nango, Documentation of European Everything, 2017, 1996 Mercedes Sprinter, video projection, color, sound, 10min.

Theo Eshetu, Atlas Fractured, 2017, Digital video projected on banner, color, sound, 35min (Kassel version)

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, Cast porcelain necklace made from the ash of reindeer bones, approx. 200 pieces

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, Lightbox with a digital photograph from the original installation of Pile o’ Sápmi in Febuary, 2016

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Object 53, 2016, Oil on wood

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Object 55, 2016, Oil and colored pencil on paper

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Object 58, 2016, Oil on wood

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Object 52, 2016, Oil on wood

Otobong Nkanga, Carved to Flow, 2017, Performance and installation

Dan Peterman, Kassel Ingot Project (Iron), 2017, Iron ingots

Roger Bernat/FFF, The Place of the Thing, 2017, Mixed media installation

Ross Birrell, Criollo, 2017, Two inkject prints

Ross Birrell, Criollo, 2017, Digital video, color, sound, 6:52min.

Maria Hassabi, Staging: Lighting Wall #1, 2017, High heat acrylic paint, 18 Coyo 54 x 3S Warm White LED Par lights

Daniel García Andújar, Atlas, The Disasters of War, 2016-2017, Eighty-two digital prints on paper

Francisco de Goya, Yo lo vi (I saw it), 1810s, Etching (This work is part of Daniel García Andújar’s installation work The Disasters of War/Trojan Horse)