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AbstractIn this article we explore two art projects that each, in their own way, thematise Nordic European colonialism and exhibition culture, and the relationship between the two. European Attraction Limited, by the Swedish-Norwegian artist Lars Cuzner and the Sudanese-Norwegian artist Mohamed Ali Fadlabi, was presented in the context of the Bicentenary of the Norwegian Constitution in Oslo in 2014. The Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect Joar Nango’s European Everything was commissioned for documenta 14 (2017), which took place both in Athens and Kassel. The article discusses the art projects in relation to a historical exhibition practice that they directly or indirectly invoke, namely the so-called ‘living exhibition’, and the continuation of this tradition in the biennale culture of today. By emphasising this contextualisation and comparing the two art projects, we explore which opportunities for articulation of historical and contemporary agency the projects open or close. Moreover, how do European Attraction Limited and European Everything in their respective approaches relate to Nordic colonialism in the past and in the present? Central to our investigation are the terms agency, presence, hybridity, and relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project is a collective site-specific exhibition that took place as a parallel action to the Documenta 14 happenings in Athens. Despite being showcased as a progressive decision by the Documenta institution to move the exhibitions for the first time out of Germany into another country—and perhaps to indicate with this gesture its solidarity with Greece—for many Greek intellectuals and artists this narrative seemed equally colonial and imperialistic. A sticker in the city center summarized the critical approach toward the art institution: “Dear Documenta, I refuse to exoticize myself to increase your cultural capital. Sincerely, the people.” Thus, a few anti-Documenta performances and art happenings were organized during April and May 2017, one of them being "Grossraum 21C" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suzanne Cotter is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Here she explains some of the artistic installations and performances she curated while Director of the Alvaro Siza‐designed Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. She reflects on exhibitions she curated with three individual artists whose work engages with concepts of architecture as an aesthetic and social language of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the guiding principle “Learning from Athens” the 14th edition of documenta in 2017 was presented in the form of two nearly simultaneous, separate and at the same time related exhibitions in two historically very different and rather distant cities, Kassel and Athens, respectively in two different countries, Germany in the middle of Europe and Greece on the outskirts of Europe. With this curatorial approach Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk obviously goes against the principles of the venerable art institution, which was founded in 1955 by artist and art educator Arnold Bode in Kassel and, since then, is implemented as a periodical exhibition with a 100-day duration at its venue in Kassel. Moreover, Szymczyk disengages documenta from its well-established position as a hosting institution that traditionally invites artists and cultural creators from all over the world to Kassel, and assigns it a new role as guest with the aim to manifest “the dissolution of barriers separating those who lack the simplest means from those who are usually all-too-willing to give them lessons but seldom a hand”, as he articulated in his concept in 2013. In this paper, I will investigate how the curatorial concept of documenta 14 challenges not only the institutional history, structure and status of documenta but also how it resumes and transforms documenta’s initial understanding of an ethics of cultural connectivity in times of crisis and traumatic historical ruptures for today. From a transcultural perspective, I will critically examine, how far the curatorially initiated “terms of invitation” and “forms of collaboration” for the exhibition between Kassel and Athens can be acknowledged as a shared cultural practice within an open process that goes beyond the simple logic of oppositions between North and South, or the West and ‘the Rest’, binaries of exclusion and inclusion, or any essentializing and reducing criteria of national identity. According to this, I will also discuss how documenta 14’s claim “Learning from Athens” addresses and implements fundamental ideas of critical art education, which are strongly related to democratic conditions of participation and the legitimacy to produce knowledge and meaning in a globally interconnected and increasingly unpredictable world.

This essay contributes to the growing body of research on crisis-related street art in Athens by focusing specifically on the political potential of artworks that posit the human figure as the central device of expression. Through the work of the artists One Yuro and EX!T I argue that figurative street art stages a powerful response to the biopolitics and affective regime of the crisis by rendering visible and sensible the embodied effects of precarity that it bestows upon the subject. In fostering a dynamic interplay between the body of the city, the bodies on the streets, and the bodies on the walls, these artworks claim the urban landscape of Athens as a space for collectively processing and addressing the prolonged state of exception, in turn offering a symbolic point of departure for reimagining the crisis city as a site from which collective forms of solidarity and resistance may emerge. Departing from fetishizing notions of crisis creativity, they form part of a broader ecology of resistance that is sustained by a relationship to the social world of crisis that is poetic and performative rather than mimetic and representational, weaving a sense of political potentiality into the very fabric of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vivimos tiempos complejos y cargados de contradicciones. Este artículo analiza la manifiestación de esta complejidad en el arte de acción social tomando en consideración un elemento fundamental: el tiempo. Para ello, la primera parte del artículo presenta los principales modelos de temporalidad aplicados a nuestra sociedad: el primer modelo se refiere a la experiencia cotidiana del tiempo; el segundo, a la temporalidad histórica, y el tercero, a modelos sobre las tendencias generales de nuestra sociedad. Para organizar esta topografía, me he inspirado en el esquema de aporías temporales de Ricoeur en Tiempo y narración. La obra de Ricoeur argumenta que los diferentes modelos del tiempo no son compatibles entre sí, sino complementarios. La tesis del artículo consiste en trasladar este análisis al arte. Así, afirmaré que el arte contemporáneo manifiesta, sin cohesionarlas, las contradictorias visiones del tiempo y sus correspondientes tensiones sociales. Para desarrollar esta idea, analizaré la paradójica estructura temporal de formas artísticas como la apropiación, la performance y la participación. Estas formas aparecen en los dos proyectos artísticos que analizo al final como ejemplos representativos de la documenta 14 de Kassel. El molino de sangre y La sociedad de amigos de Halit son dos proyectos que, aunque de naturaleza diferente entre sí, tienen en común el poner de relieve conflictos sociales e históricos a partir de aporías temporales. Ambos tienen también como novedad buscar una salida pragmática a estas contradicciones.

Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i to kunstprosjekter som på ulike måter tematiserer europeisk utstillingskultur og nordisk kolonialisme i fortid og nåtid; «European Attraction Limited» av Lars Cuzner og Cassius Fadlabi (2011–14) og Joar Nangos «European Everything» (2017). Prosjektene diskuteres i lys av en historisk utstillingspraksis som prosjektene påkaller på en direkte eller indirekte måte, nemlig de såkalte levende etnografiske utstillinger. Hvilke mulighetsrom åpner prosjektene opp for – eller lukker?

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It is intended to discuss the artwork "Parthenon of Books" by Argentine artist Marta Minujín by analyzing the contexts that dialogue with the artwork: the burning of books during German Nazism and the military dictatorship in Argentina. The analysis is based in the curatorial proposal of documenta 14 to displace from its hegemonic center (the city of Kassel) to the South (in Athens). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documenta 14 was a unique curatorial experiment on de-centring contemporary art and rethinking its historical development. The relocation of the first half of the show from the geographical and political centre of Europe to the crisis-ridden Southern European capital of Athens implies a decolonial attitude along with the decision to involve a different material context for exhibiting. Questioning the location of Documenta that is synonymous with the city of Kassel is symptomatic with the attempt of the curatorial team to distance the exhibition from the Western European/North American cultural axis. Actually, what documenta 14 attempted and partly succeeded to present was an alternative historical narrative about the art avant-gardes in the twentieth century and how these contributed to the constitution of the contemporary art canons. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the show and to discuss its efforts in challenging Occidentalism against the background of its own institutional history, European cultural politics, the emergence of right-wing populism and the critiques of the left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, Greece has been hit by a severe economic recession followed by harsh austerity policies, gradual impoverishment, and ultimately social collapse. This article investigates the cultural landscape of the so-called 'Greek crisis', focusing on Athens, the nation's capital, and the ways the crisis discourse employs biopolitical technologies of dispossession and displacement in order to generate an intensified breed of body-politics. The article's main case study is documenta 14, a blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art organized in Athens in 2017, seemingly elaborating on the ideas of debt – classical and modern – though in fact promoting neoliberal approaches to public economy and life. The idea of 'classical debt', the article concludes, continuously reiterated by both Greece's defenders as well as its most unforgiving critics, rather than acting as an emancipatory force, ends up producing a public consisting of silent bodies, trapped in highly romanticized discourses of the past and ultimately unable to defend themselves. This tension, however, also provokes narratives and gestures made of contradictions and ambiguity, difficult to map and monitor according to established research protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text details two inter-related Envoy works, Criollo and The Athens-Kassel Ride: The Transit of Hermes, commissioned for documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, 2017. Both works respond to Tschiffely's Ride (1933), an account of a 10,000 mile journey from Buenos Aires to New York (1925–1928) by Swiss-Argentine horseman, Aimé Félix Tschiffely, riding two Argentine criollos, Mancha and Gato. The film Criollo features an Argentine criollo horse standing at the Artists' Gate entrance to Central Park at the end of sixth Avenue / Avenue of Americas, New York. Criollo, a variant of 'creole', holds associations of 'creolisation', 'cultural mixing' (Hall) and 'entanglement' (Glissant) in the context of globalisation and migration. Criollo also prompts consideration of the animal in the development of capitalism (Berger, Raulff) and a reading, in turn, of the concepts of 'bare life', 'bios' and 'zoe' (Agamben). These contexts also frame The Athens-Kassel Ride: The Transit of Hermes, a 3000km equestrian journey performed over 100 days by four Long Riders traversing Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Germany, accompanied by a Greek arravani horse 'Hermes' named after the god of border crossings who – as angel messenger – is a key figure in the thought of Michel Serres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Motivated by “the need to embody … the palpable tension between the North and the South as it is reflected, articulated, and interpreted in contemporary cultural production”, documenta 14’s selection of Athens as a “vantage point … where Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia face each other” is in line with the ancient Greek concept of the ‘cosmopolite’, a term that Diogenes first coined “as a means of overcoming the usual dualism Hellene/Barbarian”. In this article, I suggest that Naeem Mohaiemen’s feature film, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), commissioned by documenta 14 and premiered at the National Contemporary Art Museum in Athens, proposes a rich and compelling model of cosmopolitan world-making. Shot at the abandoned Elliniko Airport, the film is poetically suspended between fact and fiction, past and present, the historical and the incidental, the local and the global. Creatively positioning the concepts of cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and hospitality in dialogue, I develop a theoretical model through which I seek to explore how the literally and metaphorically liminal space inhabited by the film’s anonymous protagonist resonates with the contemporary conditions of desperate migration.

Copyright of Art Inquiry is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Motivated by "the need to embody ... the palpable tension between the North and the South as it is reflected, articulated, and interpreted in contemporary cultural production", documenta 14's selection of Athens as a "vantage point ... where Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia face each other" is in line with the ancient Greek concept of the 'cosmopolite', a term that Diogenes first coined "as a means of overcoming the usual dualism Hellene/Barbarian". In this article, I suggest that Naeem Mohaiemen's feature film, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), commissioned by documenta 14 and premiered at the National Contemporary Art Museum in Athens, proposes a rich and compelling model of cosmopolitan world-making. Shot at the abandoned Elliniko Airport, the film is poetically suspended between fact and fiction, past and present, the historical and the incidental, the local and the global. Creatively positioning the concepts of cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and hospitality in dialogue, I develop a theoretical model through which I seek to explore how the literally and metaphorically liminal space inhabited by the film's anonymous protagonist resonates with the contemporary conditions of desperate migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]