Talk

Notes Toward the Abolition of Documenta: with Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri

In 1955, the first edition of Documenta was held in Kassel, Germany, growing over its once every five year editions; to become one of the most critically regarded art exhibitions / institutions initiated in the wake of Second World War Europe. Ostensibly it was a cultural response to the devastation left throughout Europe in the wake of Nazi and Fascist crimes committed against the peoples and cultures they labeled as degenerate. 

In 2022, in its fifteenth edition, Documenta joined many art and educational institutions in the West, in a campaign to label, accuse and vilify anyone associated with support for Palestinian freedom, including its own artists and artistic directors, as degenerate. In that moment, it became explicitly a weapon of the ongoing genocide we have undeniably now witnessed in Palestine. 

We will be joined by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, who are among other things, unique in Documenta’s 70 year history to have been formally invited both as artists and curators (‘core’ agents) for one of its editions (2012).

They will share their experiences and reflect on how an institution setup to respond to genocide could become an accessory to such violence. At the basis of their talk, which they see as an invitation to an ongoing conversation and transcommunal effort, will be two interrelated questions:

- Do we imagine that we can exit the conditions for fascism, cultures of supremacy and their associated forms of genocidal violence without abolishing the forms and institutions of art, of acculturation which future them?

- If between the thinking of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Édouard Glissant; we can imagine abolition not merely as the elimination of carceral institutions but the reclaiming of worlds, of poetics of relations which no longer rely on them, then which will be our means and arts of abolition?