Documenta 14 examines the big questions of life

The excitement has begun for Documenta 14, one of the world’s foremost art events. After its grand opening in Athens on April 8 ( it will be on there till July 16), it will move to the historical city German town of Kassel, where it will be held from June 10-September 17. Curator Adam Szymczyk’s concept to expand the exhibition between these two cities will allow them to function together under a working title “Learning from Athens.” 

Since 1955, the Documenta exhibition has taken place for 100 days every five years in Kassel. It was Arnold Bode’s initiative to uplift the international contemporary art scene in post-war Germany. It has traditionally always taken place at the Fridericianum — the first museum in mainland Europe, established in 1779 — later adding other locations around the city of Kassel, which was heavily bombed in World War II.

Organised by artistic director Adam Szymczyk, together with an international team of curators, advisors and assistants, Documenta 14 will feature 160 artists. They will present the universal voices of people who are trying to come to grips with their problems as they face both cultural and political changes. The participating artists have been invited to create works with a holistic view within the context of the emerging dynamic relationship between these two cities. This would engage in a multitude of voices reaching outside the European context from the vantage point of the Mediterranean metropolis of Athens, Africa, the Middle East, to Asia.

Besides videos and installations, music and performing arts have found their way into the Documenta. On the building’s terrace, Norwegian artist Joar Nango has built a tiny village resembling a tribal community, with elements taken from different indigenous peoples from around the world. The Sámi artist has created an installation like a mobile theatre, and performances, as well as communal cooking, took place there throughout the first days.

Another fascinating installation that came alive was Nevin AladaÄŸ’s Music Room 2017. The furniture-pieces-turned-musical-instruments, with several live performances in a day. Eighty-six-year-old experimental composer and influential scholar Alvin Lucier captivated the audience with a live performance of his seminal piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, which uses repetition and the frequencies of the space to resonate the room’s spatiality.

Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez’s smart and visually arresting piece Interior Decoration (1981), is a 140-metre-long curtain that shows Colombia’s controversial President at the time, Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala, entertaining a coterie of guests. The artist collaborated with textile makers to create the decorative patterned fabric with the party scene in endless repeat, which could be ordered by the metre.

This year, five Indian artists will be showing their works at the Documenta 14. Amar Kanwar, Nilima Sheikh, K G Subramanyam, Gauri Gill, Nikhil Chopra and Ganesh Haloi will bring to the Documenta different genres of art.

Amar Kanwar was previously invited to participate in Documenta 11 and 12 and 13, making Documenta 14 his fourth time. When questioned on how this Documenta was different from the others, Kanwar stated, “Each of the previous Documentas that I have participated in, that is — 11, 12, 13 and now 14 — are unique and create their own paradigms and propositions. Okwui Enwezor, Roger Buergel, Carolyn Christov-Bakergiev and now Adam Szymczyk all are artistic directors with very special capabilities and visions. It’s been fascinatingly interesting to participate and work with them across 20 years. This time, Adam has made a significant shift, a plunge into a new political context and the act of relocation and response will create its own set of new questions and answers.”

Kanwar’s poetic visual language combines memory, literature, and history to expose social injustice and create spaces of transformative contemplation through his film and as multichannel projected installations. Based in New Delhi, 1964-born Kanwar employs a sophisticated cinematic vocabulary to narrate both individual and collective experiences.

Kanwar’s contribution to Documenta 14 tells an interesting story. There is a deliberate stillness which infuses Kanwar’s amazing new film, Such a Morning, which tells the story of a man of sciences, a mathematician losing his sight and retreating from the world. At the peak of his career, he leaves everything behind and goes to live in seclusion. There, in creeping darkness, he begins to see the light of a different world…far from the violence and depravation of today’s world.

In a brief note on this work in Documenta 14, Kanwar states, “It’s a modern parable about two people’s quiet engagement with truth. The film, Such a Morning, navigates multiple transitions between mathematics and poetry, democracy and fascism, fear and freedom. In the cusp between the eye and the mind, shifting time brushes every moment into new potencies, with each character seeking the truth through phantom visions from within the depths of darkness.”

In his other works, Kanwar projects different aspects of darkness in our lives. In his video, The Scene of Crime from The Sovereign Forest, the darkness spells the futility of converting rice fields into concrete jungles. Here, his video portrays a breathtaking green land in Orissa, just prior to erasure as territories marked for acquisition by industries from the poor farmers. His multi-channel installation serves as the voice of the underprivileged as it unfolds the magnitude of their loss in an ingenious way. This is achieved with 226 variety of rice seeds, three handmade paper books and a video. The seeds will become a distant memory once the land becomes an industrial city.

Kanwar exposes the sinister wound of Partition that has fractured the moral fibre of India and Pakistan in A Season Outside (1997). He shows the absurd rituals at the border that simply evoke the futility of this separation. Symbolically, darkness manifests itself in the plight of the Tibetan refugees and in the look on a boy’s face in a Tibetan refugee camp as he shoves another child to the ground.

A Night of Prophecy (2002), featuring a series of poems and songs recorded in eleven languages across the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, and Kashmir, portrays a people caught in a struggle around caste, poverty and disenfranchisement. 

The Lightning Testimonies is a disturbing eight-channel video installation exploring the often repressed, always sensitive, and newly urgent subject of sexual violence against women on the Indian subcontinent. The work is a complex mixture of concurrent accounts, with stories ranging from wide-scale abduction and rape during the Partition of India in 1947 to the powerful anti-rape protests in Manipur in 2004.

Photographer and artist Gauri Gill (b. 1970) plays with issues of identity, race and social structure through her photographs. She projects the plight of the underprivileged that she has extensively photographed. Gauri Gill’s photographic archive portrays rural communities — including peasants, nomads and migrants —living in the desert of western Rajasthan. Gill brings to life the problems these communities face. Four of her mesmerizing series of black-and-white photographs are installed in the incredible Epigraphic Museum, the oldest (and perhaps only) museum of writing in the world.

The Mark on the Wall (1999-ongoing) documents drawings composed by local artists, children and teachers in government schools under the now lapsed “Leher Kaksha” scheme, initiated by the state to help children learn visually from the walls in their classrooms, to explore glimpses of the collective mind of a rural community.

Proofs of Residence (1999-ongoing) are records of Jogi homes, including the only “pucca” (concrete) homes that the nomadic community have owned. They were granted as compensation by the Indian government after their “kutcha” (temporary mud) homes were lost to a flood in 2000. However, the houses often lay empty or barred, as without jobs, Jogi families must continue to wander afield to earn a living.

Traces (1999-ongoing) is a series memorialising both unmarked and marked graves. These handmade graves belong to individuals with relatively few economic resources. Created from materials found in nature, occasionally with handwritten gravestones, they are reabsorbed by the landscape as other creatures of the earth imbibe them, or erased by sand and time. Belonging to both Muslim and Hindu communities, they point to a more heterogeneous complexity underlying national thought and religious traditions.

Birth Series (2005) witnesses the birth conducted by a great midwife and feminist, Kasumbi Dai, of her granddaughter, in a remote village in Ghafan.

Nilima Sheikh’s visual language combines ancient mythology with modern history. Born in Delhi in 1945, Sheikh trained in Baroda and has long been involved with the social and political issues that affect Kashmir. She has combined the magnificence of the valley with the unease caused by party-politics in her inimitable way.

There is much more happening beyond the confines of the fame of Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003-14). It appears to have exquisite images of richly coloured scenes of rustic joy that are interspersed with visual quotes from ancient miniatures and Kashmiri folktales. On a closer look, you realise that this interplay between idea, poetry and painting has several layers. Furthermore, the disturbing title of the series is a line borrowed from the poem, I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight (1997) by the late Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Quotes from Ali’s poems and poetry by the fourteenth-century female mystic Lal DÄ•d of Kashmir and Salman Rushdie’s novels are juxtaposed with environmental and social crisis or concern. Her work shows that the hold of Sheikh’s culture is vital and central to her being.

Several influences from miniature manuscript painting, Pichwai cloth scrolls, the hand-stenciled patterning of landscape, folktales, colonial-era illustrated manuals, the writings of Kashmiri poets and historians, and the voices of Sufi mystics are evident in her paintings. The artist uses layers of visual and textual elements to bring to life the pain, grief, and violence that continue to assault this valley.

The works are put together with handmade papers and brushes that are painstakingly prepared, with a family of traditional paper stencil (Sanjhi) artists in Mathura, northern India, over nearly two decades.

It is her beautiful new work Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind (2016) that has a rare quality. Here, she has composed a 16-panel tempera painting that encloses an octagonal space like a shamiana, a traditional South Asian tented pavilions where people assemble for ceremonies, theatre, memorial events, and political gatherings. This fragile paper architecture evokes memories of temporary shelters that offer rest to pilgrims. Sheikh’s work’s covers migration, exile, transient geographies, and shared historiographies crossing Asia and Europe.

Performance artist Nikhil Chopra creates a physical connect between Athens and Kassel through his work. Drawing a Line Through Landscape (2017) are performances, installation and video created by Chopra in a former tavern in Athens. Chopra stages a three-day performance in which he makes a wall drawing of the open sea, before setting off for a road trip to Germany through Eastern Europe which will culminate in Kassel. He will perform in various places throughout his journey, spreading the word about the Documenta. In his recent work, characters such as the Black Pearl in La Perle Noire (2014) set a course of capture and voyage: the struggles of being lost and found while crossing disparate geographies that include rivers, the desert and cobbled streets. This migrating form continues in Chopra’s upcoming new work, which connects the cities of Athens and Kassel through a nomadic journey among people, landscapes and cultural memory.

Chopra (b. 1974) brings to life the old world of royalty that prevailed in India. Lying upon an oriental carpet, propped up with pillows, the mustachioed subject with kohl-lined eyes in Chopra’s The Death of Sir Raja III (2005) projects the decrepit, decadent state of royalty after the expiry of its statute, burdened by finery. Chopra constructs the fictional Indian aristocrat Sir Raja. By doing so, the artist breaks all the barriers between art, theatre, cinema, painting, photography, installation, autobiography and performance. Chopra creates an illusion that instills excitement when viewing. 

After his education in Baroda (Vadodara), Gujarat, and the US, Chopra became interested in the crossover of theatre and performance art. The artist mesmerizes the audience as he takes on the mantle of a gentleman in a top hat, Yog Raj Chitrakar (loosely based on the artist’s grandfather) and within the course of a few hours transforms into a lady draped in fake pearls and black lace. Meanwhile, a foreign landscape is drawn onto the wall in many shades of lipstick. Gender is repeatedly deconstructed in Chopra’s work.

The artist focuses on narratives of aristocracy, colonial modernity and an itinerant minor subjecthood through different skins — masks, props, backdrops and sets.

K. G. Subramanyan’s final mural before his death in June 2016, The War of the Relics (2013), is a rare and ambitious feat of the human spirit. Painted by an eighty-eight-year-old artist, this 2.7 × 12.2 mural reflects both intensity and urgency. There are layers to this painting as the jumble of images — heraldic motifs, icons, hybrid creatures, and decorative embellishments — some familiar, some foreign, some mythical are part of a narrative. They reflect today’s world of warring tribes, of sectarian hostilities, and religious intolerance. They suggest that this war is being fought with medieval mindsets and modern tools.

Kerala-born Subramanyan (1924-2016) has focused on the causes of fight, which can be traced back to a children’s book he wrote and illustrated, titled When God First Made the Animals He Made Them All Alike (1969). He narrates the tale of animals that created differences to be different, but later fell so much in love with their disguises that they lost the ability to comprehend. He repeated the theme in terracotta reliefs such as Generals and Trophies (1971) and Anatomy Lesson (2008), and paintings such as The City Is Not for Burning (1993), Massacre of the Innocents (2002), and Divided City (2002), each of which was completed in response to a disagreement. 

A Gandhian activist before he became an artist, Subramanyan deplored violence in the name of language, culture or religion, which he believed should serve to unite rather than divide communities. 

Ganesh Haloi’s works are minimal and exquisite. His paintings have become an intricate narrative of nature in an abstract form. A meticulous abstract recording of nature continues to be his focus, in colours that range from beige to shades of red, blue and green, converts the natural surroundings into artistic images. There is a clear mix of the magical and surreal element in the artist’s work, evoking sounds of rustling, ripple, and at times, a silence gently capturing the senses of the viewer as they reveal the power of nature over time. The artist chooses to use dots, dashes, lines as mysterious signs for trees, water, green fields, enhancing the close link between nature and art.

Born in a suburban district of East Bengal that is now part of Bangladesh in 1936, Haloi’s aesthetic language distills memories of events such as the Bengal famine, rural-urban migration, and the genocidal Partition of the Indian subcontinent that began in 1947.

Haloi (b. 1936) joined the Archaeological Survey of India as a senior artist in 1957 soon after the completion of his artistic education in Calcutta. He methodically studied the paintings in the caves and monasteries at Ajanta, an ancient Buddhist site that has inspired artists for centuries. There, he pioneered a comparative reading of the religious iconography of the cave murals, and began to understand the role of light and natural pigments in mobilising figuration as shadow play. Haloi supplemented his monument studies with anthropological sketches of Indigenous communities living in the area.

Documenta 14 is an examination of the big questions of life, time and space and the essence of our aesthetics. The 

works reveal the unfailing strength of the artists’ vision. The artworks may not be beautiful, but they are works that have substance and presence. Some works have taken the commonest objects out of context to imbue them with a broader meaning and new identity.