60 years of Documenta | symposium programme

Documenta marks 60 years since it was founded in 1995 with an international contemporary art symposium in Kassel (17-18 July) entitled: DOCUMENTA 1997 – 2017: EXPANDING THOUGHT-COLLECTIVES and a city festival for visitors on 19 July. Kassel has planned a grand festival for all visitors to the documenta city under the patronage of Lord Mayor Bertram Hilgen. Numerous art and cultural institutions, individual performers, and international guests are putting together a program devoted to recounting and celebrating the 60-year history of the documenta in exhibitions, films, performances, discussions, readings, and tours conceived specifically for the festival. The festival will open at the Unterer Friedrichsplatz, and tours will embark from there to the various event sites in the city throughout the day. An open-air concert at the Friedrichsplatz in the evening of July 19, 2015 will bring the festival and the week of events in honour of the 60th anniversary of the documenta to a close. Symposium The notion of what a contemporary art exhibition can and should be has fundamentally changed over the past twenty years. Exhibitions have evolved into a format that aims not only to present art, but also to communicate current thinking and theories to an increasingly global public. Each documenta is an occasion and opportunity for bringing specific modes of thinking, along with concurrent values and world-views, from their sites of production (e.g. academia) into society. These developments and the adjacent questions and problems posed are in the centre of this symposium. What are the origins of the theories underpinning the last four documentas and how do we evaluate them today? What thought styles (Denkstile) are at all compatible with the exhibition format? And how are the global aspirations of the exhibitions realised? These and further questions will be discussed with the Artistic Directors of the past four editions of documenta and the Artistic Director of the upcoming documenta 14 in dialogue with international guests from the fields of art, academia and theory. Carmen Amor, Karen Barad, Beatrice von Bismarck, Kristina Buch, Roger M. Buergel, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Peter Galison, David Joselit, Hiwa K, Lu Jie, Michael Lüthy, Sarat Maharaj, Oliver Marchart, Laura Zheng Ning, Ruth Noack, Nikos Papastergiadis, Griselda Pollock, Tino Sehgal, Raqs Media Collective/Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Adam Szymczyk, Wang Jianwei The symposium is held in English with simultaneous translation into German. Free admission Please register in advance: symposium@documenta60.de More information on Universes-in-Universe