Denying History, Exporting the Myth: dOCUMENTA(13) between Kassel and Kabul

Abstract

In the present article we will study the 13th edition of Kassel's documenta, held in 2012. On that year, part of the exhibition took place outside of Germany, for the first time in more than 50 years of existence, with a seminar and a reduced exhibition being held in Kabul, Afghanistan. The study here presented is part of a wider research aimed at problematizing the relationship of mega-exhibitions with the context of global crisis in the 21st century, with special attention to the geopolitical shift of the “War on Terror”. Hence our particular interest in this exhibition held in Afghanistan only a few years after the US military invasion. We will analyze the curatorial speech of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director of the dOCUMENTA(13), as well as artworks of artists who exhibited in both Kassel and Kabul – with the aid of exhibition catalogues as well as archival material from documenta archiv. We will try to relate this specific edition to the history of the documenta, or more accurately, we will try to elucidate how the curatorship appropriates that history and turns it into myth, in an effort to legitimize its action in the present.