City with K: Documenta in Afghan
Goshka Macuga’s Kassel digital collage carpet in Kabul (Photo: Anne Eberhard)
30 June 2012
Where is the Documenta held? Something starting with “K” ... Oh, right: Kabul. Surprised? You needn’t be. For this year it is in the Afghan capital city that the Documenta is returning to its original idea. By Ingo Arend
Sandbags before the front door, rolled barbed wire on every roof, everything surrounded by heavy concrete barriers. To get into the hotel in Kabul, one first has to pass through five security checks. Soldiers with machine guns patrol every street corner.
Anyone wanting to understand what Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev meant when she made the “state of siege” a core theme of her Documenta in Kassel only needs to travel to Kabul. The current code word of art discourse in Germany is made manifest in the expanse of rubble in the Afghan capital city.
Eleven years after the start of the military operation Enduring Freedom, the state of siege is still the norm in Kabul. US army dirigibles in the hazy air scan every movement in the valley closed in by three mountain ranges. An acrid stench of cement dust, exhaust fumes, excrement and mangos holds its inhabitants captive.
It may seem an odd idea to hold an art exhibition in this earthly vale of tears. Yet the analogies between Kassel and Kabul, Germany and Afghanistan appeared too striking to the Documenta head when she began a research journey to Hindu Kush two years ago. Both, the Italian-American native thought, went through a similar process of “collapse and recovery” – another key phrase of her show.
The transfer works astonishingly well
Considering the fact that the works of the 27 artists invited to Kabul’s Queen’s Palace by Bakargiev are in an entirely different context here, the transfer works astonishingly well. The former harem is located in Bagh-e-Babur Gardens, the mausoleum of the legendary founder of the northern Indian Mogul dynasty built in 1532.The astonishing thing is that if you stroll through the Kabul Documenta, the one in Kassel is suddenly better understandable. The Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres hung Alighiero Boetti’s Mappa there. The Italian Arte Povera artist had the first of his Maps of the World embroidered in Kabul by Afghani women. One Hotel, Torres’s project that follows in Boetti’s footprints, not only can be seen as a romantic investigation, but also one of “retreat” – another of Bakargiev’s guiding words.
In 1971, Boetti created a vanishing point from the art world of the west with the little hotel in the backyard of a busy shopping street of Kabul. Torres tracked down the hotel that was given up in 1977 and renovated it. During lunch in the garden of the small brick cottage, the Documenta clique agreed that the restored refuge was the ideal place for an artists-in-residence programme.
Destroyed palaces in Kabul and Kassel
Yet the show evolves its true strength in the theme of “collapse and recovery.” As the American artist Michael Rakowitz sets up his work in the Queen’s Palace he pulls a photograph of the destroyed Fridericianum from his pocket. A native helper asks immediately, “Is that Afghanistan?” A resident of the country in which hardly a building in the capital city survived the civil war understands the meaning of “collapse and recovery” without any words. The circle completes itself with Goshka Macuga’s digital collage on carpet. In Kassel, the 360-degree panorama image shows the participants of a banquet in Bagh-e Babur. The carpet in the Queen’s Palace shows a group of German artists in front of the Fridericianum.The programme with which Bakargiev wished to stimulate Afghanistan’s creative forces was more important to her than the exhibition. She incorporated local stakeholders in it such as Afghanistan’s only art school for women. And unobserved by the public, she herself and some of the Documenta artists have been working with 25 Afghani art students and artists for two years in 15 seminars.
In Bamiyan, Michael Rakowitz let young sculptors replicate the Buddha statues that had been destroyed by the Taliban. Mariam Ghani and young filmmakers searched the Afghan film archives that survived the Taliban iconoclasm. Whoever should one day systematically develop this treasure would help to shape the cultural identity of the country. And Bakargiev reopened old spaces. Guests to the premier of Francis Alys’s poetic documentary film about Kabul’s street kids gathered in the open air in the Behzad, a bombed out avant-garde cinema from the 1940s.
Arnold Bode’s revenant
In southern Asia of all places, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev revived the founding idea of the Documenta: Arnold Bode’s idea of art as a helper in reconstruction after the catastrophe of war. What a picture: There his revenant stood last week in a dimly lit seminar room of Kabul University in front of a painting of Afghan President Hamid Karsai in the style of Afghan post-war realism.The resolute art historian adjusts the veil over her blonde curls and discusses her credo with art students of both genders. “Art must play a role in the social process of reconstruction and imagination is the driving force of it,” says Bakargiev. So, it was fitting that her Kabul Documenta opened the next day in a garden. Arnold Bode also launched the first Documenta in 1955 as a fringe programme to the Federal Garden Show.
Bakargiev’s bridging of Kabul and Kassel will go down as a rare case of an intervention in art history, which really awakened the forces of civil society that must carry the Afghanistan of the future. And thousands of excitedly conversing visitors on the first day are encouraging signs that slowly but surely martial is being displaced by the “subtle expression” that Ajmal Maiwandi speaks of not only among a handful of intellectuals. Besides the Kabul Goethe-Institut the director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture was Bakargiev’s chief cooperation partner.
Perhaps this will lead one day to a state of “hope” – Bakargiev’s fourth key word. And the young student Zainab Haidary takes this encouragement with her from her course: “I come from a poor country that is battling the aftermath of war. But, I feel rich, because I can paint.”
The Documenta is among the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art. It is held every five years in Kassel and lasts for 100 days. The first Documenta in 1955 was directed by Arnold Bode. The twelfth Documenta in 2007 had the highest number of visitors with approximately 750,000. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev from the United States is the artistic director of this year’s thirteenth Documenta, which is being held under the motto of Collapse and Recovery from 9 June until 16 September 2012. Twenty-seven artists from the Documenta will be represented in Kabul from 20 June until 19 July 2012. The satellite exhibition in Afghanistan is a joint project by the Documenta and the Goethe-Institut. Other outposts are in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt and Banff, Canada.
This slightly abridged article was used with the permission of the “taz”. You can access the complete article here.
