In Kassel, the twelfth Documenta has begun

Kassel (Germany) - The equivalent of world exhibitions Expo or the Olympic Games in the field of contemporary visual arts is the Documenta exhibition, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. This year, among approximately one hundred authors, three Czech artists are also exhibiting. The twelfth edition of the exhibition, which attracts artists and audiences in unprecedented ways, will start on Saturday and last until October.
Since Wednesday, experts and journalists have been viewing the exhibitions at the Fredericianum Museum and other locations around the city.
The name Documenta is derived from the plural form of the Latin term for proof, evidence, document. The tradition of Documenta was established in 1955 in Kassel by local artist Arnold Bode, who wanted to bring German art out of isolation and confront it with international art.
Since 1972, Documenta has had various curators who always set the theme of the exhibition. Since approximately that time, the exhibitions have mostly been socially and politically charged.
The number of Documenta visitors continues to grow, from the initial 135,000 spectators at the first event to more than 650,000 who attended the last one in 2002. However, the costs of organizing it have also significantly increased - the budget of the first was approximately 180,000 euros, while the last exhibition cost over 11 million euros.
Documenta also generates profit - though it is just a fraction of the event's cost, it amounts to hundreds of thousands of euros. However, the main gain for exhibitors is the prestige and awareness that important gallerists operating on the international scene have of them.
Documenta is also an event that serves as a kind of seismograph for the current art scene, and its main curator always becomes a "guru" of contemporary art for a few years. This year, it is Roger M. Buergel, a forty-five-year-old German curator and exhibition organizer. He promised that the individual works would - in accordance with the exhibition's motto - not only be displayed alone but will relate to each other.
The twelfth Documenta has three leitmotifs in the form of questions: Is modernity our heritage?, What is the essence of life? and What needs to be done? Among dozens of authors, three Czech artists - Kateřina Šedá, Jiří Kovanda, and Běla Kolářová - are participating for the first time in a long time.
Thirty-year-old Šedá, living in Brno, prepared a record of one of her actions, which always involves members of a specific social group. She became famous with the project "It Doesn't Matter," in which she made her seventy-five-year-old resigning grandmother reminisce about her life. As a former long-time manager of a hardware store, her grandmother remembers over 650 types of goods, including their prices. Under her granddaughter's guidance, she began to draw them, and together they found a meaningful activity for her grandmother. At the same time, her fateful sentence "It doesn't matter..." disappeared, which was also a significant reason for the entire project. A book has been published containing 176 drawings from the "warehouse" along with a long interview that Šedá conducted with her grandmother. For this project, Šedá received the Chalupecký Award for 2005.
Kovanda exhibits photographs from his performances from the 1970s. Běla Kolářová's collection includes X-rays and photographs from the 1960s, collages, and assemblages that she created from everyday "female" necessities like hairpins, safety pins, buttons, and so on, both at that time and later. In earlier Documentas, her life partner Jiří Kolář exhibited, and Czech art has also previously been represented by artists like Zdeněk Sýkora and Vladimír Kokolia.
The connection of the latest artworks with pieces created several decades ago characterizes this year's Documenta. The social dimension of the works is also apparent, as is the absence of a single dominant medium. Compared to the previous exhibition, there are few video projections, while photographs and installations are frequent. However, the viewer can pause at the dance performance of American choreographer Trisha Brown, who also exhibits her drawings at another location in the exhibition. Classical painting is also underrepresented. One of the few examples of classical techniques is a fifty-meter ink drawing on silk, in which Chinese artist Lu Hao captured the contemporary appearance of a Chinese street.
With the opening of the Documenta exhibition, this year's European marathon of major contemporary art exhibitions continues. A week ago, the 52nd Venice Biennale opened its doors, and after Documenta, the Skulptur Projekte exhibition, a major display of sculptures and forms, will take place in nearby Münster, which occurs once every ten years.