documenta 12

The singular character of the exhibition has been preserved. Every five years, a new director is chosen and the exhibition is reinvented, a concept which to date has been affirmed by the public's interest. The number of visitors has continually risen. More than 650 thousand visitors came to Documenta11.

Under continually changing directorship, and in the equally leisurely and inexorable rhythm of five years, the documenta has advanced to become an authoritative worldwide seismograph of contemporary art. At the documenta, it becomes manifest whether art is succeeding in grasping the world in images and whether these images have validity for its public.

The artistic director of documenta 12

The artistic director of documenta 12 was Roger M. Buergel , an internationally active exhibition organiser and curator who was born in Berlin in 1962. Together with the art historian, Ruth Noack as curator, he, in line with the documenta's claims, showed art from the most various regions of the world and in all conceivable media. The works should were not shown simply unrelated to each other in a line, but were put into relationship with each other.

The leitmotifs: Three questions posed for art but also for its public

To initiate such a productive exchange, the documenta posed three questions for art, and also for its public: Is humanity able to recognise a common horizon beyond all differences? Is art the medium for this knowledge? What is to be done, what do we have to learn in order to cope intellectually and spiritually with globalisation? Is that a question of aesthetic education and cultivation? What constitutes life, when everything is subtracted which does not belong essentially to life? Does art help us to penetrate to what is essential?

documenta 12 magazines — a platform and three issues

"The documenta 12 magazines will provide an interested public with the knowledge required to be able to move competently and therefore leisurely through the space of the exhibition." (Roger M. Buergel)

One important project of the exhibition were the documenta 12 magazines, a magazine of magazines. More than 70 periodicals, magazines and online media from all over the world entered into a dialogue. They discussed and reflected the topics and theses of the exhibition. They reacted to them and questioned them on the basis of their particular knowledge.

How does documenta gain access to specific knowledge in the world? And how can it communicate this knowledge?

One possible approach was found with documenta 12 magazines. 18 months ago, about 90 publications with different formats, orientations and focuses, as well as art, culture and theory media from around the world were invited to think collectively about the motifs and themes of documenta 12. They actively took on the exhibition’s guiding questions, discussing them at editorial level and passing them on to writers and artists.

In the intervening period, this has generated over 300 articles, essays, interviews, commentaries, and illustrated essays. It has also created a space for exchange, debate, controversy, and translation - a many-layered "communication process that throws up a great deal of dust and issues we can use for the exhibition," as Roger M. Buergel puts it, "themes or priorities that were lying dormant and which we had not expected."
The material generated by the three issues leading up to the exhibition — Modernity?, Life!, and Education: — is intended to act as a navigation aid for readers and visitors to documenta 12.

documenta 12 magazines will continue to perform this function during the exhibition itself (in a separate section of the exhibition, a web journal, and a series of discussions and presentations

The documenta 12 advisory board

The documenta 12 advisory board met regularly in Kassel from the beginning of 2006. It consisted of about forty local ‘experts’, who contributed their own experience and viewpoints in the areas of formal or informal education, town planning, academic and research work, social work, political organisations, religious and cultural communities, as well as from their work with children and young people. In collaboration with the documenta 12 team, they considered the significance of the leimotifs in the city of Kassel, linking them to mind-sets, contexts and topics of local relevance.

Advisory board discussions on the significance of the leitmotifs for Kassel yielded a number of themes representing locally specific incarnations of these issues. Thus, for example, the question of modernity inevitably took us back to Kassel's history as an industrial city that brought forth not only wealth and social mobility but also armaments and destruction. The post-war reconstruction of the city was conducted in the spirit of modern rationalism. The question of bare existence also touches on this historic trauma, yet it is equally topical today when describing the high level of unemployment, for instance, or the precarious situation of migrants. The educational landscape in Kassel is in a state of upheaval, which is most clearly evident in the restructuring of the university from a comprehensive university with an integrative concept to an institution dedicated to creating elites. Nevertheless, many groups, initiatives and networks have also long recognised the collective practice they live as an organisational form of education and self-care.

The work of the documenta 12 advisory board continued in the city. In order to define the key questions more clearly and make them available as inspiration for debate within society, the board members developed practically oriented activities and discussions and put them into practice in their own diverse contexts. Thus, for example, some town planners and geographers devoted themselves to the condition of public space, to a network of initiatives for children and young people, and planned a summer of action on the key questions. Unemployed people took these issues as an opportunity to work together to re-evaluate the crisis of a labour society. On top of that, a special series of events were dedicated to exploring the connections between education, migration and exclusion.

A further, not unimportant, role for the advisory board members was to serve as contact and support persons for artists developing their work in or with reference to Kassel, making contact, creating access and bringing their local knowledge to bear on the documenta 12 process.

Even in the months before the exhibition opened, the advisory board's activities were already having repercussions in Kassel. They provided an impulse for debate on the social and political significance of the key questions, and encouraged the documenta 12 public to relate these questions, and ultimately the art as well, to themselves, to their environment and to their own lives.

The documenta 12 advisory board was founded in collaboration with the Kassel cultural centre Schlachthof e.V., which continued to develop and support the board in cooperation.