For a few days there has been a debate in various media as to whether there are anti-Semitic tendencies in the program when planning “Documenta 15” in Kassel. The discussion was triggered by the blog post by the small Kassel initiative “Alliance against Anti-Semitism”. She accuses the Indonesian curatorial group Ruangrupa, which is responsible for the upcoming edition of the arts festival, of serving anti-Zionist prejudices. An anonymously written text contains numerous references to artists and employees who are said to be questioning the existence of Israel and who have made anti-Semitic statements.
However, this capital charge is justified in this case with rather dubious indications. It is said that there are Documenta artists who work in a cultural center in Ramallah that is named after an Arab nationalist who was a Nazi sympathizer and has been dead for 70 years. Reference is made to an artist’s literary text, which the blog’s author group mistook for a factual account. Further proof is seen in the Documenta collaboration of two people who signed the critical objection “We can only change what we confront” in 2020. In the letter, hundreds of intellectuals from Klaus Staeck to Monica Bonvicini criticize the Bundestag’s decision to condemn all support for the Israel boycott movement BDS (“Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions”) as anti-Semitic and to block public funds in suspected cases.
The Kassler blog post was popularized by the Journalist Thomas E. Schmidt then as his own comment in the time and called for the intervention of the State Secretary for Culture, Claudia Roth. Schmidt also wrote that the “lurching art sanctuary” documenta could be discontinued with the 15th edition. Reason: The documenta already had a Nazi-incriminated founding figure in Werner Haftmann, and the most important documenta artist, Joseph Beuys, “brown ideological traces” became visible.
The Kassler blog has a clearly anti-Islamic tone
Criticism of artists because they deal with former Nazi sympathizers has already died out in Germany. No one has ever called for the Berlin Volksbühne to be closed because Frank Castorf staged texts by anti-Semites or supporters of the brown system like Curzio Malaparte or Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It is necessary for complex and free art to also deal with ambiguous paths of thought – and a central reason for the existence of culture that does not want to serve propaganda purposes.
Ruangrupa reject any anti-Semitic idea. At an international art exhibition like the documenta, which traditionally makes it its task to make controversial topics understandable from different artistic perspectives, the inclusion of positions that provoke contradiction is part of the elixir of life.
In addition, the Kassler blog has a clearly anti-Islamic tone. The site’s posts, which are riddled with degrading vocabulary, rely more on phrases like “anti-Semitism” than on understanding questions.
The program on topics such as colonialism, climate justice and the consequences of growth that Ruangrupa developed for Kassel, on the other hand, misses precisely these questionable templates of moral buzzwords with which they are confronted here. That doesn’t guarantee that documenta 15 will be a great exhibition. But if it were designed with the generalizing ways of thinking of its critics, that would probably be the death of the show.