documenta fifteen, kassel

documenta fifteen was not conceived by an individual curator with a handpicked team, as Okwui Enwezor did in 2002, or Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012. The finding commission¹ chose after months of evaluations an artists’ collective called ruangrupa from Indonesia,² which proposed to invite collectives mainly from the Global South and, with few exceptions, no individual artists. The central metaphor for their documenta concept was lumbung: “A vernacular agrarian term in Bahasa Indonesia, ‘lumbung refers to a rice barn, where a village community stores their harvests together, to be managed collectively, as a way to face an unpredictable future” (Handbook 2022: 12). The approach convinced the jury because it focused on resource- and knowledge-sharing through artistic processes and, unlike previous editions, did not aim to serve the art market by boosting the individual artist's fame and market value. Ironically, this new kind of documenta opened mid-June on the same...