Visual Arts

In Kassel preparations for the Documenta, which is taking place for the thirteenth time in 2012 under the direction of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, are already in full swing.

On December 3, 2008, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (born in 1958 in New Jersey) was appointed artistic director of Documenta 13, which will take place in Kassel from June 9 to September 16, 2012. She is the second woman after Catherine David to be named curator of the Documenta. The daughter of a Bulgarian and an Italian, she was previously curator at the PS1 in New York, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art, and is today Director of the art museum Museo di Arte Contemporanea in the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. In 2008 Christov-Bakargiev, who is an art historian specialising in Arte Povera, headed the Sydney Biennale.

Visual appearance

The Italian graphic design agency Leftloft, which is designing the visual appearance of the exhibition, has also developed the logo for Documenta 13. This is not a “traditional logo”, because the typeface can vary according to the various media such as press release, website or letterhead. Christov-Bakargiev explains: “Since its beginning in the 1950s, the Documenta has mainly used a small ‘d’ instead of a capital ‘D’. While this was then a radical democratic gesture and design decision, the non-capitalisation of words is today an example of the one of the many unintended gestures of the digital world, which sends messages through networks and round the globe. To reverse the normal spelling rules by writing the rest of the word in capital letters demands from the reader active engagement, attention and a certain extra effort at the keyboard. Leftloft’s development is interesting and, by alluding to early modern graphic design of the twentieth century, brings with an symbolic meaning”.

First works

Uniquely in the history of the Documenta, the first art works have been presented two years before the actual start of the exhibition. In June 2010 the work Idee di Pietra (Views of a Stone) by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, who has participated in three previous Documenta exhibitions, was already installed in the Karlsaue in Kassel. There Penone set a nine metres high bronze tree in the ground, in whose upper branches lies a large stone. Next to this enigmatic monument grows a smaller, genuine tree. According to the Documenta curator, “nature and culture” will “combine” in this sculpture. Moreover, the work shows that Arte Povera, which arose in the 1960s in Italy, and its prominent exponent Penone form an important basis for Documenta 13.

AND AND AND is an artists initiative that will use the time until Documenta 13 in 2012 to explore the role of art and culture together with other artists and members of the cultural community from all over the world. The resultant series of artistic interventions and events is part of Documenta 13. It provides an inventory of various contemporary positions and offers diverse starting-points for discussion. By the end of December 2010, AND AND AND had already presented six events world-wide.

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts

In the run-up to Documenta 13, Christov-Bakargiev has also commissioned a series of publications with Hatje-Cantz publishers under the title 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. The variety of formats ranges from facsimiles of handwritten notes, essays and transcribed conversations to artists’ books. With contributions from various disciplines such as art, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, literary studies, linguistics and literature, the series constitutes a place within Documenta 13 where the authors examine how the mind works as the source of human conceptions about the world.

Unlike fixed statements, thoughts are always variations. This is the background of the notebooks. Among the notes is the Letter to A Friend by Carolyn Christov-Bakagiev, in which she gives an insight into her working process and outlines some key issues of Documenta 13: “What can this exhibition be today, given the heterogeneity of the public it addresses and the historical development of group exhibitions into a non-commercial site of intense encounters?” The “notebooks”, designed by Leftloft, will begin to be published in March 2011 in three formats, in both English and German.



With the opening of the borders between disciplines and fields of knowledge, and the emphasis upon processual questions, Documenta 13, which is being planned by its artistic director together with a number of “agents”, consultants and artists, is emerging out of a kind of thinking inspired by interlocking ontologies rather than the pursuit of a clearly defined curatorial conception. In October 2009, Christov-Bakargiev held a lecture in San Francisco about Documenta 13 and therein gave the exhibition the following motto: “The dance was very frenetic, roaring, clashing, ringing, twisting, rolling and lasted (for) a long time”. A poetic, narrative-figurative approach that promises an exciting exhibition for 2012.