A teenaged girl is texting her boyfriend from her bedroom, seeking compassion: “I’m just in a really bad place right now.” The boy responds: “Oh, what are you doing in Germany?”
Many can relate to this fierce meme which appeared on social media following the silencing of voices in Germany condemning Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Recently, the finding committee of documenta 16, the next edition of the German mega-exhibition held in Kassel every five years since 1955, collectively resigned because of the “unchallenged media and public discrediting” of one of their members, Indian writer and curator Ranjit Hoskote, who had signed a 2019 anti-fascist statement which the widely despised German culture minister Claudia Roth described, with her usual nuance, as “clearly anti-Semitic and loaded with Israel-hostile conspiracy theories.”
As the supervisory board is currently tasked with restructuring the documenta selection process, the fear is that the freedom traditionally granted to the exhibition’s artistic direction will be drastically constrained in order to prevent any new national “scandal” the likes of which occurred around documenta 15 in 2022. That edition, curated by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, saw selected artworks removed following accusations of anti-Semitic content, which eventually led to the ongoing overhaul of the exhibition’s governance structure. And all this followed on the heels of yet another “scandal” surrounding documenta 14, the reasons of which were different, but also very much a product of their time: the decision by artistic director Adam Szymczyk to hold overlapping shows in Athens and Kassel, which occasioned a hailstorm of political and media establishment criticism for a €5.3 million budget shortfall.
A 14-hour-long film about curating an exhibition may sound like an ordeal, and yet what Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis has achieved with exergue – on documenta 14 is without a doubt one the most compelling, nerve-wracking, and timely films of recent years. Aptly premiering at the Berlinale in February, the film is the definitive making-of record of the German quinquennial’s 2017 edition. Over three years, Athiridis followed Szymczyk’s attempts to organize documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel as the Polish artistic director scouted across several countries, brainstormed with a team of excellent curators (including Hila Peleg, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Paul B. Preciado), spoke with some of the most relevant contemporary intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers (including Douglas Gordon, Hiwa K, Ben Russell, and Narimane Mari), negotiated with institutions, installed the works, met with politicians, answered the press, and went through the most exciting to the most dire times.
Through its jumbled structure and precision in depicting the curatorial discourse, exergue – on documenta 14 is the opposite of the story of a shipwreck: it is a successful attempt to salvage what demagogy savagely tore down. At once complex and welcoming for an audience unfamiliar with the art world, it relies as much on its protagonist’s wit and charisma as on the relevance of his artistic choices, which only proved to be strengthened by the global events that shaped its context. It’s very much a process-driven film, where the idea to bring documenta to a country notoriously enslaved by debt, reverberating in the one eventually looming over the organization of the event, allows the film to take on monumental proportions in a quiet and unassuming manner.
The astonishing level of access that Athiridis managed to obtain brings us to reflect upon what’s generally allowed to be public and what’s condemned to stay private, on transparency and opacity in the handling of political and cultural matters. And the tremendous efforts to piece together the continuity of documenta 14’s elaboration subverts the ways by which the future is blocked and times are pre-empted, be it due to censorship or financial debt. It’s not the least of this film’s achievements to bring to light, as in any exhibition, works that have been condemned to oblivion, and to do justice to things that have been repressed.
Cinema Scope: On the documenta 14 official team list, you appear as “cinematographer.” Did the film originate from you, or from a proposition of its artistic director, Adam Szymczyk?
Dimitris Athiridis: When I met Adam in 2015, I had this idea of making an observational documentary about him as artistic director of documenta 14 in the making, and I asked him. It took him five seconds for him to say yes, and I started following him. I was not commissioned by him or someone else. It’s a funny thing,
