Artists: Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Angela Melitopoulos, Bili Bidjocka, Israel Galván, Niño de Elche, and Pedro G. Romero, Bouchra Khalili, Angelo Plessas, Agnes Denes, Termokiss

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, Tofufabrik, Giesshaus, Gottschalk-Halle, Nordstadtpark, 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: Tofufabrik

Tofufabrik was founded toward the end of the 1990s by György Debreceni and Heike Hellerung, pioneers of the “bio tofu scene” in Hessen. What started as a small, local supplier of organic bean curd became one of the main suppliers of tofu products throughout Germany. When the factory’s small-scale production could no longer handle the high demand, it was sold to a much larger dairy concern in neighboring Neukirchen. The Tofufabrik is now the screening space for Commensal (2017), a new film installation by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Their work explores the complicated story of Issei Sagawa, who gained notoriety in 1981 when, as a graduate student in Paris, he murdered a fellow student and engaged in acts of cannibalism.

Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Commensal, 2017, Video and film installation: digital video and 16mm film transferred from 8mm film, video: color, sound, 27min., film: color and black-and-white, sound 42min.

documenta 14: Giesshaus

The Giesshaus (foundry) was built as part of the Henschelei, a factory established in the nineteenth century by the industrialist family Henschel, which specialized in the construction of locomotives, vehicles, and airplanes. The Henschel factory became one of the main sources of arms production in Nazi Germany during World War II, deploying more than 6,000 forced workers. During documenta 14, the Giesshaus transforms into a screening space for the multichannel video and sound installation Crossings (2017) by Angela Melitopoulos. Shot recently in metallurgy plants in Lavrion and Skouries, Greece, as well as in refugee camps in Lesbos and Piraeus, this documentary work engages the social dimensions and historical continuities of the region’s economic and civil wars.

Angela Melitopoulos, Crossings, 2017, Four-channel video and sixteen-channel sound installation, color, sound, 109min.

documenta 14: Gottschalk-Halle

Many threads of Kassel’s history are woven together in this abandoned warehouse. Built in the 1950s on a location belonging to two of the city’s most prominent industrial dynasties, Henschel company and the Gottschalk & Co. textile manufactory, the Gottschalk-Halle was used by the latter as a storage facility. In the 1970s it was taken over by the University of Kassel to perform much the same function. As such, the Gottschalk-Halle has always been a transitory site—neither a space of production nor of consumption but rather a reservoir and record of passage. The future of the building is uncertain: it will either be destroyed or repurposed for student housing, as it stands currently on the edge of the university’s rapidly expanding campus. While various artworks on view echo the Gottschalk-Halle’s pasts, the venue also assembles artists who work on issues of displacement and migration, connecting the economic threads that pass through the site’s history to geopolitical and sociocultural lines of transition.

Pedro G. Romero, Israel Galván and Niño de Elche, La farsa monea, 2017, mixed media installation and performance

Angelo Plessas, Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood, 2017, Multimedia installation, duration variable

Bili Bidjocka, The Chess Society: J’ai L’impression qu’il y a une historie d’amor entre la fille de salle et le grand noir qui fait le ménage (I have the impression that there is a love story between the waitressand the tall black man doing the cleaning, 2017, Bead curtain, wood, chessboard projection, water basin, tables, chairs, chess games and clocks, neon, found words and objects, and web-based game

documenta 14: Nordstadtpark

Nordstadtpark in Kassel is full of people on any summer evening or weekend, a place of leisure for the truly multinational neighborhood, as well as for students at the University of Kassel and visitors to the adjacent Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, which organizes events, community activities, and language courses for the many immigrant communities that live in the area.

Extending the vitality of the site into a monumental ecological structure is Agnes Denes’s The Living Pyramid (2017), a sculpture that is simultaneously organic and social in both its need for and reciprocation of care.

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, 2015-2017, Flowers, grasses, soil, wood, and paint, 9 x 9 x 9m.