According to the exhibition’s five-year economic plan for 2019 to 2023, this budget is made up of the following: admission fees €12.5 million; third-party funds and other income €4.7 million; the shareholders—the city of Kassel and the state of Hesse—€10.75 million each; and the German Federal Cultural Foundation €3.5 million. On top of that, a buffer of €5 to €6 million is set aside for contingencies.
Florian Cramer made a detailed mapping of the German media and the political factions behind the documenta debates in his contribution to the symposium “(un)Common Grounds: Reflecting on documenta fifteen” hosted by Framer Framed on September 23, 2022. A video recording of the symposium will be available in the near future. In the meantime, see →.
Hanan Toukan interprets the depoliticizing effects of the “NGO-ization” of society as resulting from the professionalization of activism and a shift from a grassroots “political society” to a professionalized elite “civil society.” See Toukan, “On Being ‘The Other’ in Post-Civil War Lebanon: Aid and the Politics of Art in Processes of Contemporary Cultural Production,” Arab Studies Journal 18, no. 1 (2010). See also Minna Valjakka, “Arts and Ecosystems: Building Towards Regeneration of ‘Cultural Resilience’ in Indonesia,” in Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, ed. Carin Kuoni et al. (Valiz, 2021).
See, for example, Justin Malachowski’s study on documenta fifteen member El Warcha: “Staging Arts in the Historic City: Development Funding, Social Media Images, and Tunisia’s Contemporary Public Art Scene,” Journal of City and Society, forthcoming.
David Teh, “Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship,” Afterall, no. 30 (2012) →.
Lula Lasminingrat and Efriza, “The Development of National Food Estate: The Indonesian Food Crisis Anticipation Strategy,” Jurnal Pertahanan & Bela Negara 10, no. 3 (2020). See also an analysis on the deployment of lumbung, both historical and in policy speak, in Graeme MacRae and Thomas Reuter, “Lumbung Nation,” Indonesia and the Malay World 48, no. 142 (2020).
See, for example, Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review, no. 82 (1973).
See, for example, Antariksa, “Cross-Cultural Counterparts: The Role of Keimin Bunka Shidosho in Indonesian Art, 1942–1945,” in Tsuyoshi Ozawa: The Return of Painter F, ed. Keiko Toyoda and Fumi Toyoda (Tokyo: Shiseido, 2015). English translation →.
Agung Hujatnika and Almira Belinda Zainsjah, “Artist Collectives in Post-1998 Indonesia: Resurgence, or a Turn (?),” International Conference on Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art (AESCIART), published in Art Creation, Mediation, and Reception in the 21st Century Indonesia (2020).
Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Cornell University Press, 1967).
Hujatnika and Zainsjah, “Artist Collectives in Post-1998 Indonesia.”
Valjakka, “Arts and Ecosystems.”
Teh, “Who Cares a Lot?”
Elly Kent, “The History of Conscious Collectivity Behind Ruangrupa,” ArtReview Asia, July 6, 2022 →.
See “XIV: Audience as Allies, Witnesses, and Enemies (Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Ann Liv Young & Florian Malzacher),” March 28, 2022, in Art of Assembly, podcast →.
The positive sense of “anti-politics” was manifested by Vaclav Havel, as “one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them” beyond the technology of power and manipulation.
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013).
See Juliane Rebentisch, “Autonomie? Autonomie! Ästhetische Erfahrung heute,” in Ästhetische Erfahrung: Gegenstände, Konzepte, Geschichtlichkeit, ed. Sonderforschungsbereich 626 (FU Berlin, 2006). See also Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Duke University Press, 2009).
See documenta’s YouTube channel for a video portrait of the collective, which was also on display in the exhibition →.
Ghalya Saadawi has made a comprehensive exposition on the “critical virtue” of art, which art uses to reproduce itself while economically and ideologically lubricating capitalism. See Saadawi, “Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes,” in Between the Material and the Possible, ed. Bassam El Baroni (Sternberg Press, 2022). See also Victoria Ivanova’s analysis of art as a new container for the liberal subject of human rights: “Two Lives, One Order,” 2015 →.
Quoted in Nuraini Juliastuti, “Ruangrupa: A Conversation on Horizontal Organisation,” Afterall, no. 30 (2012) →.
Valjakka, “Arts and Ecosystems.”
Marina Vishmidt, “Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, ed Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (MIT Press, 2017); and Vishmidt, ”Only as Self-Relating Negativity: Infrastructure and Critique,” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 13 no. 3 (2017). See also Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020).
Term by Marion von Osten. See “Trans-Local, Post-Disciplinary Organizational Practice: A Conversation between Binna Choi and Marion von Osten,” in Cluster: Dialectionary, ed. Binna Choi et al. (Sternberg Press, 2014).
Sven Lütticken, “Social Media: Practices of (In)visibility in Contemporary Art,” Afterall, no. 40 (2015) →.
Gerald Raunig, “Flatness Rules: Instituent Practices and Institutions of the Common,” in Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, ed. Pascal Gielen (Valiz, 2013); and Tal Beery, “Instituent Practices: Art After (Public) Institutions,” Temporary Art Review, January 2, 2018 →.
Timon Beyes and Ditte Vilstrup Holm, “How Art Becomes Organization: Reimagining Aesthetics, Sites and Politics of Entrepreneurship,” Organization Studies 43 no. 2 (2022).
“Upstream” and “downstream” are terms used in supply-chain studies and business. The terms are applicable to the art world if one traces the flow of funding and the availability of venues and avenues, together with value-adding mechanisms in the arts. Some artists have comprehensive understandings of this and have been trying to push artists “upstream.” See Gary Zhexi Zhang, “The Artist of the Future,” ArtReview, April 2020 →.
Inland’s proximity to power means their position is, of course, much more privileged than that of many other like-minded initiatives.
This is a creative development based on the cogent analysis of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) made by Emily Rosamond, “Shared Stakes, Distributed Investment: Socially Engaged Art and the Financialization of Social Impact,” Finance and Society 2, no. 2 (2016). Identifying specific points through which Inland’s projects develop these supporting structures, we align them with existing lines of public funding and examine how private investment can reinforce governmental efforts beyond financial contributions and the logic of investment. Details of the project will be published in an upcoming issue of OnCurating.
The author would like to thank Andreas Niegl, Nikolay Smirnov, Elvia Wilk, and Danilo Scholz for their constructive inputs to the text. The author is grateful for Irwan Ahmett and others for the numerous conversations along the way.