Documenta’s 2012 edition was inaugurated on Saturday 9 in the German city of Kassel, one of the most important contemporary art events in the world, held every five years.
The 2012 exhibition, commissioned by Bulgarian-American curator Carolyn Christo-Bakargiev, bets on the interdisciplinary and proposals that will be conceptual and formally “assembled” during the event, opened to viewers for one hundred days, through September 16.
Nearly 150 artists from 55 countries propose pieces that somehow question the capitalist economic model, and the state of art, as a strategy to reach a breaking point within the system from visual proposals. The creators are joined by representatives from other disciplines, just like literature, movies, economy, politic activism, whether feminist or ecologist; physics, biology and even zoology.
The artworks, performances, actions and interventions aren’t focused in one space, but spread all over several museums, Karlsaue park, movies, warehouses and ancient ballrooms. Likewise, Documenta has an international presence with events and seminars at the Canadian National Park of Banff, as well as in El Cairo, Alexandria (Egypt) and Kabul (Afghanistan).
Latin America attends this formidable event with proposals that range from an ambitious project of public intervention (Guillermo Faivoich and Nicolas Goldber tried to take the 37-ton meteorite from El Chaco, in Argentina, to Kassel though they finally had to represent it with a cube in the square of Fridericianum Museum) to a makeshift clinic to treat stress (at Mexican Pedro Reyes’ El SANATORIUM, the patients are called to relaxed by sticking white pigeons, light bulbs and cubes to rag dolls, among other therapies).
The Mexican representation is complemented by the projects of Mariana Castillo Deballs, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Adriana Lara, Julieta Aranda, Time/Banky collective, Mario Garcia Torres, who surprises with a non-indulgent installation that refers to decades of destruction of the Afghan capital from the history of a hotel and the narration of its owner.
Other guests from the continent: Adrian Villar Rojas (Argentina), Maria Thereza Alves and Maria Martins (Brazil), Lissette Olivares y Cheto Castellano (Chile), Javier Tellez (Venezuela) and Luis Berrios-Negron (Puerto Rico); as well as Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, who presents a journal from 1974 with notes on his film project Duna, based on Frank Herbert’s novel, with notes on Tarot cards; and Josefina Hepp and Horacio Larrain, from Atacama Desert Center at the Catholic University, which is going to deliver, during the last week of Documenta, a two-day lecture on the wealthy of this Latin American landscape.
This one hundred-day program follows the slogan Destruccion y Renovacion (Destruction and Renovation), which has livened up the city of Kassel since 1955, when the founder of the event, Arnold Bode, inaugurated the first exhibition with works of Picasso and Kandinsky in order to take art to the German working class and rehabilitate the culture and visual arts after World War II.
Sources: http://www.elmundo.es / http://www.eluniversal.com / http://d13.documenta.de
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