Documenta 11 Proves To Be The Most Controversial
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, September 11, 2025


Documenta 11 Proves To Be The Most Controversial



KASSEL, GERMANY.- Costing $11 million and occupying five huge sites here, Documenta 11 is the biggest, most expensive version yet of this mega-survey of contemporary art, to which, improbably, more than half a million people flock every five years. This happens to be the most politically oriented Documenta, too, even more than the last one, in 1997. Okwui Enwezor, 39, the Nigerian-born director chosen to put the show together, has delivered more or less what he has promised for the last few years: a global, multigenerational exhibition with works by some unfamiliar names and by international collectives of artists. The result is more about social and economic evangelism than anything else, precisely as he intended. In the catalog Mr. Enwezor, writes, "the exhibition counterpoises the supposed purity and autonomy of the art object against the rethinking of modernity based on ideas of transculturality and extraterritoriality." Social documentaries abound: videos, texts and photographs of railroad laborers in Moldavia, of earthquake damage in Japan, of toxic dump reclamation projects in the United States. All sincere, on the whole not too preachy, thankfully, and occasionally engrossing. The show’s goal, Mr. Enwezor has said, is knowledge through art (one artist described the works here as "epistemological machines”).











Today's News

September 11, 2025

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The Julia Stoschek Foundation presents more than 40 works by Mark Leckey

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The Met presents first major exhibition on Man Ray's radical reinvention of art through the rayograph

Colored gemstones shine in Heritage's Sept. 29 fall jewelry auction

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Secession presents 'Danzante,' a new exhibition by artist June Crespo

The National Art Center, Tokyo presents Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010

Hicham Berrada's new exhibition 'Dilutions' unveils AI-generated paintings

PalaisPopulaire opens Charmaine Poh's first institutional exhibition

National Gallery announces 10 new artistic projects for After the Rain

Willie Birch debuts new monochrome paintings in solo exhibition 'Up on the Roof'

La Pascaline 1642: For the first time in history, a machine replaces the human brain

Max Lamb and 1882 Ltd. collaborate on new ceramic furniture exhibition

Swarthmore College presents 'Transitions: Recent prints and animations by Kakyoung Lee'




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