Documenta 14

documenta 14 was masterminded by Adam Szymczyk and his team of fifteen curators, writers, and critics, among them Bonaventure Ndikung (Savvy Contemporary Berlin) as curator at large. Ndikung was in charge of the research for potential African contributors at home and abroad and communication with the sixteen of them who ultimately participated.When developing his concept, Adam Szymczyk was irked by the German Finance Minister's statement that Greece should do its “homework” before receiving further loans to save the country from bankruptcy. Consequently, when unveiling his documenta project on October 6, 2014, Szymczyk described Greece as “Meier 2017). In protest against such condescending attitudes, he chose Athens as an equal venue, titled this documenta Learning from Athens, and even opened the event in Greece two months before Kassel. Considering Greece's history of expansion and use of slaves, it is up to debate if he chose the perfect counter-example against neoliberal practice.I came to Athens with several questions in mind. I wanted to see to what extent the African and African diaspora artists at documenta 14 would reflect clichéd expectations of so-called African contemporary artists. I was interested in the strategies they might adopt to resist being understood superficially and challenge viewers to explore deeper layers of meaning (for concepts of opacity and detour, see Britton 1999: 19). Also, I wondered whether new aesthetic expressions would be put on this art stage to challenge notions of complete and static commodified art works in contrast to open-ended, unfinished, and hard-to-commercialize processes (Rush 2013: 30). And last but not least, I wanted to find out to what extent the artists managed to produce miracles with scant funding, applying principles of economy and cultural alchemy to make gold from pebbles (Ngugi wa Thiongo'o 2012: 2). With those questions in mind, several of the contributions struck me as I made my way through the maze of venues in Athens.Like his contribution in Kassel, Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Ghana) presented an arresting work in Syntagma Square adapted to the location and its history but here called Check Point Prosfygika. 1934–2034 (2016–2017; Fig. 1). The Royal Palace became the Greek parliament building in 1934 and its location renamed for the constitution—syntagma—that King Otto had been compelled to grant to the people in 1843. Prosfygika refers to the Greek refugees who arrived in 1922 from Turkey. Mahama chose the most symbolic location in recent Greek history and there orchestrated a performance with volunteers sewing jute sacks together to form a huge carpet alluding to trade, migration, and socioeconomic processes. He succeeded in creating an encounter of two aesthetics, the open-ended and the unfinished, by launching a process that looks unlikely to be accomplished, alluding to Greek mythology, in which, in the Odyssey, Penelope undid at night what she wove during the day. At the same time he referenced canonized works of Arte Povera artists, such as Janis Kounellis and Alberto Burri, who produced similar aesthetic effects with materials used in their working processes.Less exposed to the public was the project by Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Nigeria), Carved to Flow (2017; Fig. 2), a soap workshop in a quiet neighborhood near the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Like Mahama, she wanted to discuss working conditions and access to resources by tracing the trade routes of ingredients from Africa for manufacturing and selling soap, in this case black soap made according to an old Greek recipe. Later, in Kassel, each visitor was allowed to buy a single piece of soap for €20 from vendors equipped with hawker's trays designed by Nkanga. The paid employees were trained to talk about the project while selling and wrapping the soap in paper printed with poems by the artist. The overwhelmingly smart design of the workshop in Athens and portable sales desks in Kassel, clever explanations by the artist and her assistants, muted what the materials would have told by themselves, but Nkanga hoped to make Nigerians aware of their rich natural resources and the potential of such soap production.Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965, Dakar/Benin) made a strong statement against apartheid with an installation of her own vertical drawings hanging from the ceiling and photos by Peter Mugabene mounted on school desks (Figs. 3a–b). Her “skillfully unskillful” fragile lines and the photos of cruel crackdowns of demonstrations in South Africa co-referred as allies in different modes about the traumata of apartheid.In the EMST Athens museum of art, a triangular room with three points of access defined by walls colored in red, yellow, and green hosted Biafra Time Capsule by Olu Oguibe (b. 1964, Nigeria; Fig. 4) in long vitrines. Quite different from his monumental obelisk in Kassel, this piece was a compilation of books that all had to do with Biafra. To me the books were disturbingly musealized under a glass cover, only a few of them opened, and the installation gave the impression that this sad chapter of African history is closed for ever, which might have been contrary to Oguibe's intention.A performance piece of note was presented on April 9, 2016, in the courtyard of the ASFA. At 7:00 pm sharp, a group of eight black women wearing different white dresses presented their piece The Portrait (2016; Figs. 5a–c). The name of their artists’ group, iQhiya, signifies in isiXhosa the cushion-cloth that women wear to protect their heads when carrying heavy containers of water and therefore symbolizes the inequality of opportunities based on gender, the burden and the strength of women. Each of the young women stepped silently, barefoot, on empty beer-bottles in red crates. They stood stoically still as long as they could bear the pain in their feet, avoiding eye contact with any of the audience. At the end of the performance, towards 9 pm, half of the group members were still standing on the bottles, half were standing next to the crates, one woman was sitting. The documenta program stated that the performance was about the dignity of women; however, to me it was a symbol for the integrity of humankind, all genders included, which the eight women portrayed efficiently with very little material.In the context of a documenta that was largely criticized for being hypocritical, one might say that, for the “African artists,” the price of being given the opportunity to present themselves on a global stage as representatives of the Global South was to be to some extent instrumentalized as components of Szymczyk's do-gooder and political-correctness varnish. Some kept their concepts clear and created works with precision and economy, like Mahama and iQhiya, while others became confused and were led to redundancy, possibly because too much funding was available.Although documenta 14 had a budget of about €40 million, much of the funding for contributions by African artists came from the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. When looking at this constellation, the lack of true recognition for creators of African descent, no matter where they live, is more than obvious and it sheds light on how Eurocentric documenta still is. When a city applies for the Olympics, part of their plan must show how sustainable the project is in the long term. Instead of wasting millions on temporary structures, rents for apartments in Kassel that were never used, air-conditioning in hot Athens, costly transport (for example, shipping the entire EMST collection to Kassel), parties and press conferences ... documenta 14 could have proved that it supports or at least is aware of the cultural structures that work constantly under pressure there where they are really needed (Perlson 2017). Imagine what CCA Lagos, Nubuke Foundation in Ghana, or Banjou Station in Cameroon would do with just €1 million. In this sense, documenta 14 was an example of reverse alchemy: turning gold into pebbles

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• The Indigenous Sublime

  Konstantinos Kalantzis•Current Anthropology•2023

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