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what’s cooking at Zwehrenturm?

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Friedrichsplatz- Marta Minujín, “Parthenon of books” - why all that plastic? also, the amount of Twilight books is hilarious. I am sure they were banned in ultra-religious schools etc. but you can’t really categorize them as banned literature. Perhaps accidentally the fact that it’s still under construction echoes the Athens Biennale piece/statement with the same name in 2016 when everything started and the “guest” still had some humility.

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Nordstadtpark - Agnes Denes “the living pyramid” & Palais Bellevue- details from “matrix of knowledge” and slides from “philosophical works and unrealized projects”. Denes’ work fits really nicely in the main curatorial theme of ‘learning from/with’ as she went from ecological artist interested in systems/technology and cybernetics to full mystic that systematised geometrically possible ways of knowing (visual, linguistic or otherwise). The space itself and the way the works are exhibited both in Kassel and the ones in ASFA in Athens needed a bit more work both cause they didn't work at all with the nearby pieces but also because the light conditions made some vitrines barely legible

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Hauptbahnhof Underground, scenes of revolt in a classroom in iQhiya’s “Monday” and circus music in the abandoned station make for a super creepy introduction

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Tofufabrik - Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, “Commensal” The tongue-in-cheek choice to place a film that narrates in great detail acts of cannibalism in a tofu factory was what attracted me to this remote venue despite the horrible weather. However, the content of the film in combination with the subtle sour smell of the place made it so viscerally nauseating that I preferred walking back to the city in the rain. I recommend it to the ones that can stomach it for its cinematography even though it’s thematic is completely out of the scope of any of the d14 curatorial statements

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Neue Neue Galerie - The content is so intense(most pieces directly responding to colonial and national violence) and so cramped in that room that it feels like you need to light up a candle on your way out. Maybe Hassabi’s lights serve that function?

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Neue Neue Galerie’s highlight, Roger Bernat, “The Place of the Thing” Participatory Art at its best(well almost)

Bernat taking as starting point the toxic, propagandist,participatory theatre of Thingspiele popularized in Nazi Germany, he sketched out his own participatory project that intended to transport a fake marble stone from Athens to Kassel by sharing the act with collectives, activists and artists, enacting and testing the claims of documenta 14. The fact that the stone never arrived in Kassel as a result of it being held captive as a performative critique of the LGBTQI+ Refugees group in Greece is quite telling of the way Bernat's project but also documenta14 in general were received in Athens. The rhetoric of humility, willingness to share, optimism for collaborations etc. was not backed up by tangible gestures of trust and hospitality. While the curators argued that a non-participation cannot be a failure of the project as the goal is the "journey" of the stone not its arrival on the destination, the fact that they even romanticized that journey taking into consideration what this line on the map signifies for thousands of refugees, perhaps highlights (more than anything else) their shortsightedness.

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Documenta Halle - Lala Rukh, “Women’s Action Forum Calendar” & “The Unholy Trinity”, Cornelius Cardew, Pope L., Sedje Hémon

Some very interesting pieces but the sheer amount of people and the narrowness of the spaces made it really hard to enjoy any of it. 

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Ottoneum -  Nomin Bold, “One Day of Mongolia”, Dispossession, gentrification and everyday scenes of urbanization in contemporary Mongolia

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Prinz Gholam, “Speaking of Pictures (Kallimarmaro)” and Nelly’s photographs from enaki Museum Photographic Archives in Documenta Halle & Sepulkralkultur,The use of unstylized posing bodies in the very (stereo)typical ancient Athens surroundings works really well with Nelly’s hyper-stylized photographs. Nelly’s was educated in Germany and thus developed a very nostalgic and idealized view of her greek heritage, fetishizing ruins and recreating ancient sculpture poses in her photographs. She was closely affiliated with the Dictatorship’s regime in Greece(and later Germany’s Nazi party) and her Tourism photography was used as propaganda, building a purified image of Greece. I would actually love to see this work in conversation with Alexandra Bachzetsis’ work that also plays with Greek nostalgia(of 80s and 90s though) and is extremely stylized in its aesthetic

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Terre Thaemlitz, “Lovebomb/Ai No Bakudan” in Sepulkralkultur museum Absolute highlight for the exhibition in Kassel(I’d claim also Terre’s “Interstices” is one of the pieces to stand out in EMST in Athens). Also, it works so well with indirectly reflecting on the documenta themes without getting into didactic tropes like most of the other films. In Terre’s words: “From Helen of Troy (love of sex) to the Christian Crusades (love of religion) to Nazism (love of the fatherland) to Operation Infinite Justice (love of freedom), societies have placed love at the heart of conflict and conquest - all of which concealed larger cultural agendas in a cloak of opaque righteousness... Love is... a redundant construction of pacifying hysteria, a mandatory insult to appease our senses. Its persuasive image of universality is its greatest act of culturally invasive violence. A perverse mirror of the cut.” 

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Kunsthochschule Kassel - hilarious performance in the Rudgang by Film students, so many things to unpack

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Andreas Angelidakis, “ Ads for Athens “ in Stadtmuseum Kassel, While not my personal favourite in the Stadtmuseum, I particularly enjoy the satyre and irony of the modern greek state(although i recognize that the piece is a bit exclusive of the non-greek speakers). Btw Stadtmuseum was the best, all-in-all venue in terms of curation, spatial organization and politics of display

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Hiwa K., “ View from Above “, in Stadtmuseum Kassel and  Banu Cennetoğlu, “BEINGSAFEISSCARY” on the facade of Fridericianum. The film is beautiful and moving and very nicely positioned in the Stadtmuseum. The “BEINGSAFEISSCARY” text on the facade of the Fridericianum is supposed to be based on a greek graffiti as seen by the artist. However, it seems like a clickbait-type, instagram-friendly statement next to most of the content of the exhibition that depicts struggles of communities trying to achieve any level of safety. 

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Biggest curatorial fail of Neue Galerie, While it seems like a great idea juxtaposing the classical “National Figures” sculptures  that supposedly capture the essence of the “great” western civilizations with the beautifully crafted Benin Bronzes it is rather not a good idea to place the latter on the left and right of the entrance and facing the other way as their placement makes them more part of the architecture than exhibits themselves. Also the classical sculptures are framed carefully and really dominate the space. Maybe even placing them right in front of the entrances would have been a better idea. On a positive note though, I absolutely loved Katalin Ladik’s recordings on the corridor as hearing a woman sing/shout “Tito, Tiiiito, Titooo” for 2 min on a loop is quite surreal and it almost makes up for the otherwise spatial failure of that room. 

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Neue Galerie, Since the postcolonial narrative seems to be weirdly not self-reflexive(didn’t Germany had colonies as well?), it is quite pleasing to see the romanticized imaginaries of Greece by German intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century. 

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Marshall Plan posters for the reconstruction of Europe in Neue Galerie