Documenta, the prestigious German contemporary art exhibition held twice a decade, announced on Wednesday that Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, would oversee the next edition in 2027.
With an established curator from a globally renowned museum at the helm, Documenta hopes to move on from controversies that have plagued it in recent years, including a highly polarizing show in 2022 and the resignation of the search committee asked to choose the curator of the 2027 show because of disputes related to the Israel-Hamas war.
Beckwith embraced the challenges at a news conference in Kassel, the city in central Germany where Documenta takes place, saying she would make navigating crises a central theme of her exhibition.
In a world of conflict, Beckwith said, “I think this is a marvelous time to turn to artists and their capacity for imagination, so that we can all think about ways to navigate this oncoming future.”
She will face an uphill battle, leading an institution that is no stranger to crisis through a German cultural landscape that is struggling to maintain international relevance amid growing concerns about a clampdown on free speech in the arts.
While she recognized that artists have opinions and sometimes want to agitate with their art, she also emphasized the importance of balancing artists’ politics with the German context, where ethical and legal parameters set limits on acceptable speech.
In the last edition of Documenta, in 2022, these limits were tested by the discovery of antisemitic caricatures in a huge agitprop mural that was displayed in the center of Kassel. The artwork, which was quickly taken down, caused months of debate and controversy.
The caricatures had gone unnoticed by the edition’s artistic directors, an Indonesian art collective called ruangrupa, whose “decentralized” concept for the exhibition outsourced many curatorial responsibilities to other arts collectives.
Beckwith said she would be more hands-on. “I don’t sort of invite an artist and then they show up with an artwork the day of the exhibition,” she said. “Every exhibition is a deep collaborative practice for me with artists,” she added, “so there are no surprises.”
Her appointment comes after a selection process mired in controversy. In November 2023, the team that was assembled to choose an artistic director resigned and four former members criticized Germany’s political climate around the war in Israel and Gaza in an open letter. Polarized debates in the arts scene, they said, made it impossible to stage an exhibition in which “an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches” was possible.
At the news conference on Wednesday, Kassel’s mayor, Sven Schoeller, described the selection committee’s resignation as “one of Documenta’s severest crises.” He praised the new selection committee, which was made up of curators and museum directors from across the world and first convened in July, for selecting a new artistic director on short notice.
Documenta was first staged in 1955 as a direct response to the “Degenerate Art” show, the Nazis’ denunciatory modern art exhibition held 18 years earlier. It has become one of the world’s most prestigious art shows, rivaled only by the Venice Biennale, and is viewed as a compass for contemporary art’s direction.
The 100-day show takes place every five years. and its 16th edition is scheduled to take place in 2027 between June 12 and Sept. 19. It is already running behind schedule after the selection committee’s resignation delayed the appointment of the artistic director.
“I begged for an extra year,” Beckwith said. The shortened time frame could mean that publication deadlines and the number of venues involved may need to be adjusted, she said, though she added that she was confident she would manage. “It is not unusual at all,” she said, “to make a grand exhibition — even at the scale of Documenta — in two-and-a-half years.”
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