documenta fifteen or lumbung one?
Más Arte Más Acción & Atelier Van Lieshout, MAMA Doc Space (2022), Photo: Bruce E. Phillips.
“We invited documenta back, asking it to be part of our journey. We refuse to be exploited by European institutional agendas that are not ours to begin with.”[01]
—ruangrupa
Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa were destined to unsettle expectations. This was indicated in early 2019 through promotional material surrounding ruangrupa’s appointment as documenta 15’s artistic directors. They unapologetically stated their intentions to introduce “a different community-oriented model of resource usage”.[02] Evidence of this intention became public in 2021 with the announcement of selected artists and collectives that some critics described as being absent of “art-world luminaries”.[03] This early publicity created a narrative that ruangrupa’s strategy was to eschew the Eurocentric, extractive and reputation-based economy that has arguably driven the ‘mega-exhibition’ circuit since at least the 1990s.
01. ruangrupa, documenta Fifteen Handbook (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022), 12.
02. documenta, “Press Release: Ruangrupa Selected as Artistic Direction of Documenta Fifteen,” Documenta (blog), 22 February 2019, https://documenta-fifteen.de/wp-content/uploads/ 2021/09/190222_Press-Release_ruangrupa-selected-as-Artistic-Direction-of-documenta- fifteen_EN.pdf.
03. Artforum, “Documenta 15 Announces Participating Artists,” Artforum (blog), 4 October 2021, https://www.artforum.com/news/documenta-15-announces-participating-artists-86874.