Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

An “ecosexual” installation by Annie Sprinkle (*1954 Philadelphia) and Beth Stephens (*1960 Montgomery, West Virginia), both of who are known for their radical feminist art and (since 2005) for wedding rituals marrying them to areas in the world, proposes a marriage with the Earth (Ill. 43). The Peruvian, Sergio Zevallos (*1962 Lima) has been living in exile in Germany since 1989. From the start of the 1980s he has been dealing with conflicts in his home country. His multimedia installation, „A War Machine“ (2017, Ill. 44a, b) deals with so-called social norms that are regarded as normal, sick, civilised or primitive. Elisabeth Wild (*1922 Vienna, Ill. 45) creates an “Iconography of Cool Chic” with her collages from lifestyle magazines. “Her approach is like a collector bringing elements of earthly glamour and glitz together in order to liberate them from the consumer world and transform the all too familiar into new images.” (Adam Szymczyk)[42]. The artist can look back on a turbulent life covering almost all of the 20th century. In 1938 she fled from the Nazis to Argentina with her parents, a Jewish wine merchant family. In 1962 she emigrated once more with her husband, the textile entrepreneur August Wild, to Basel, this time from Juan Perón’s right-wing regime, only to return with her daughter to South America once more in 1996 to live by Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.

Anyone who follows Szymczyk’s recommended tour of the 35 showplaces at the documenta 14 in Kassel[43], will arrive at well-known venues from past Documenta exhibitions, like the Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum, the Orangerie, the Karlsaue, and Kunsthochschule Kassel. But the exhibition also invites visitors to explore new venues: the Cinestar, the Gloria-Kino and the BALi-Kinos im Kulturbahnhof for film fans; then the out of the way Nordstadtpark, or the Torwache in the centre, which is highly popular with tourists. At the centre of the daily film programme in the Große and Kleine BALi cinemas are works by filmmakers whose lives have been equally influenced by art and migration. In his film “An Opera of the World” (2017. Ill. 46), Manthia Diawara (*1953 Bamako) follows migration routes to Europe, but also documents his return to Mali to observe African ensembles rehearsing an opera on the banks of the Niger, which clearly exposes the social problems and reasons for migration from Western Africa. Agnes Denes, (*1938 Budapest), a multimedia and land art artist who lives in the USA, has been creating pyramids since the mid-1960s. Her latest work, “The Living Pyramid” (2015-2017. Ill. 47), is being shown in the Nordstadtpark, which is primarily frequented by university students and the multinational inhabitants of North Kassel. According to the documenta 14 Map Booklet, the nine metre tall open-air sculpture is “a monumental ecological structure that is simultaneously organic and social because of its need for care that is provided by the artist herself.

The Ghana artist, Ibrahim Mahama (*1987 Tamale, Ill. 48) enveloped both buildings in the uncompleted Torwache (1805) with sewn up jute sacks to make up a “Check Point Sekondi Loco” (2016/17). Mahama deals with traders to exchange new sacks for old torn sacks, with which he has been covering public buildings in Accra since 2011. They are produced in Asia and, in Ghana, are used for global merchandising of cocoa, coffee, rice, beans and charcoal. “The history of world trade materialises in these sacks. For Mahama they are, on the one hand, forensic proof in his search for manifestations of capitalist economics in the world, on the other hand they reveal local references within the international working class. The people who weave, pack, load and transport articles also leave behind their sweat, their names, dates and other coordinates on the sacks. The facts become skin with scars that retell a socio-political and economic prehistory.” (Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung) [44]