Documenta 11: Reflections on an Exhibition in Three Acts [electronic resource].

Bureau for Open Culture 2018

Open access content

Documenta 11: An Exhibition in Three Acts was collectively written and performed by graduate students enrolled in James Voorhies’s spring 2018 graduate course Binding Agents: Toward an Aesthetic of the Postcolonial in Contemporary Exhibition at California College of the Arts. The script was written by culling parts of seminal texts on the discourse around Documenta 11, Magiciens de la Terre, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. Documenta 11 unleashed a discourse led by artists, curators and institutions in contemporary art to re-write and re-address colonial histories. The exhibition as a delineable thing, a form, with political potential to change perspectives and increase awareness about topics such as colonialism, immigration, and nation state became even more notably tangible around that time and with this exhibition. Enwezor disrupted the traditional form of Documenta with his 2002 edition. While the exhibition had been traditionally confined to 100 days with activity centered mostly in and around Kassel, Enwezor, instead, created five different exhibition sites, or, as he called them, “platforms.” He organized the platforms across the globe and launched the exhibition more than a year before the planned opening in June 2002 in Kassel. Today, artists and curators are heirs to this activity, operating within the legacy, or the aftermath—a post-Documenta 11 era. This project examines the impact of this legacy.
https://www.librarystack.org/documenta-11-reflections-on-an-exhibition-in-three-acts/?ref=unknown

Art--Study and teaching
Critical Theory
Museums--Curatorship
Art--Exhibitions
Culture and globalization
Postcolonialism

Text

James Voorhies
Yomna Osman
Judit Navratil
Efe Ozmen
Preston Fox
Maddie Klett
Jillian Crochet
Palija Shrestha
Bianca Moran
Yoko Tahara
Nate Padavick