documenta 12 (2007) [German/English]

“For the first time in the history of the documenta, the major event in Kassel was organized under the direction of a couple: Roger M. Buergel as the designated art director and Ruth Noack as curator. They served only “unofficially” as a two-member directorial team, however, as the documenta statutes do not allow for the possibility of two co-directors. Together, they developed a clearly defined programmatic concept under the banner of “The Migration of Forms.” What that meant was that, over the course of human history, visual culture has had only a limited number of basic forms with which to work—forms that have been used in different contexts and with different conceptual focuses throughout the history of art. Buergel/Noack pointed out that “contemporary does not mean that the works originated yesterday. They must be meaningful for people today. Documenta 12 is concerned with both historical lines of development in art and unexpected concurrences.” In order to bring these “unexpected concurrences” to light, relationships were established between works of art from different decades and cultures in which similar formal patterns have emerged—a process that has led to a “migration” of aesthetic forms across temporal and cultural boundaries culminating in the art of our postmodern world. This formalism was emphasized in the Neue Galerie by walls painted different colors. In turn, this focus on the phenomenon of migration resulted in the selection of a high percentage of artists from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. New to the program was the inclusion of old art, from fourteenthcentury Persian miniatures to global art from recent decades. Artists already long since recognized in their own homelands, such as Nasreen Mohamedi, for example, were not the only ones presented to a broad public in Germany for the first time. The works of several exemplary artists—John McCracken, Kerry James Marshall, Charlotte Poseneske, and Gerwald Rockenschaub—also migrated through all exhibition venues.” (Source)

Publisher Taschen, Cologne, 2007
ISBN 9783836500524, 3836500523
415 pages
via x

Exhibition website
WorldCat

PDF (148 MB, no OCR)