NEW FINDING COMMITTEE APPOINTED FOR DOCUMENTA 16
The supervisory board of Documenta has revealed a new six-person finding committee for the quinquennial event’s sixteenth edition, set to open in Kassel in 2027. The group comprises Yilmaz Dziewior, director of Museum Ludwig, Cologne; freelance curator Sergio Edelsztein, who founded the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv; independent curator N‘Goné Fall, an academic and former general commissioner of the Africa2020 Season in France; Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center and a codirector of the 2023 Thailand Biennale; Mami Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum; and independent curator Yasmil Raymond, a former director of Portikus and a onetime rector of Städelschule, both in Frankfurt.
The committee is tasked with finding a new artistic director for Documenta 16, following the collective resignation of the previous finding committee, which had been put together on the advice of past artistic directors after the 2022 iteration of the event was roiled by allegations of antisemitism, leading to the loss of artists and advisers and to the departure of longtime managing director Sabine Schormann. After that panel was assembled, however, Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger and Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote resigned from the committee in November, with Ettinger pointing to an inability to travel for committee meetings owing to the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and Hoskote responding to Documenta’s condemnation of his having signed a 2019 letter comparing Zionism in Israel to Hindu nationalism in India. The remaining members of the committee—Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin Rhomberg, and María Inés Rodríguez—resigned en mass a few days later, citing “grave concern for the future of Documenta” as behind their decision and further asserting, “In the current circumstances we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches that Documenta artists and curators deserve.”
“I am certain that the expert and multi-perspective make-up of the new finding committee will lead to a forward-looking proposal for the artistic direction,” said Documenta managing director Andreas Hoffmann in a statement. “This lays the foundation for the international art world to once again be a familiar and welcome guest in Kassel.”
No deadline has yet been set for appointing a new artistic director. Whoever accepts the job will not have to hew to a code of conduct, as organizers dispensed with it this past May. The director will instead be obliged to deliver a public talk explaining their curatorial theme and confirming “their understanding of respect for human dignity and how this is to be ensured in the exhibition they are to curate,” according to an earlier press release.
