Eliana Willis

When I look back over what was actually in the current Berlin Biennale, curated by artist Kader Attia and titled “Still Present!”, it seems a lot less dire than I remember.
In fact, there’s a lot of poetry in Attia’s show. There are Tammy Nguyen’s vibrant, verdant paintings, rendering the Biblical Stations of the Cross but in an indelibly intricate style. I sat twice through Haig Aivazian’s They May Own the Lanterns But We Have the Light, Episode 1: Home Alone (2022), which strings together found cartoons into a ghostly black-and-white dream-tale.
Zach Blas’s techno-horror installation is bombastic, but also truly unnerving. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) memorably weaves together myths and political musings. There’s Mónica de Miranda’s mythic film, Path to the Stars (2022), and Amal Kenawy’s resonant animation, The Purple Artificial Flower (2005).
There’s a lot of wit, formal flair, and intelligence in all these works.
Overall, the show is pitched as Kader Attia’s survey of “two decades of decolonial engagement,” a framing device I think has overdetermined the way critics have experienced it—though “Still Present!” does contain a fair amount of art that feels like a homework assignment, enough to color the whole thing.
Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
As opposed to the sociable, DIY chill-out sensibility of the current Documenta, the 2022 Berlin Biennale feels like Biennale Classic, a Biennale full of Biennale Art: work characterized by a combination of aloofness and political declaration, often with a mild gulf between the object and the wall text filled in by an assumption of shared belief. A number of this show’s stars (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Uriel Orlow, Susan Schullpi, Attia himself) are among the most-shown figures at big art exhibitions of the last five years.
I agree with Rahel Aima, who wrote in Frieze that one of the overall effects of Attia’s exhibition is to leave you asking “who is this for?” And not just in front of a work like Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Poison soluble (2013), the 2022 Berlin Biennale’s most controversial moment. That installation traps you inside a literal maze composed of blown-up details of the ultra-graphic Abu Ghraib photos of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.
Who is this for? It’s not as if the Abu Ghraib torture photos are news—they had a huge geopolitical effect from the moment they were first published 18 years ago by CBS, and caused a lot of anguish for Iraqis. I guess the idea here is that if we literally force the First World subject to confront this material again, some new catharsis will happen? But Lebel’s work does so by signal-boosting the degradation it decries. Poison soluble had to be supplemented by a rather panicked trigger warning.
A trigger warning on view at the Berlin Biennale outside of Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Poison soluble (2013). Photo ben Ben Davis.

Investigative Aesthetics, Revisited
There’s quite a bit going on in the show, and any number of routes to cut through its 80-plus artists. The main issue I’m going to talk about in relationship to Attia’s Berlin Biennale is the current status of “investigative aesthetics.”
As I understand it, that term, associated with the group Forensic Architecture, was meant specifically to resist the temptation, evidenced by Lebel, to make art that tried to rouse its audience by directly showing atrocities or suffering. Instead, the idea was to assume the persona of an investigator, marshaling high-tech evidence, advancing specific cases.
Thus, when Forensic Architecture showed the three-channel video 77sqm_9:26min at Documenta 14 in 2017 it was received as an advance on the more abstract fulminations of a lot of global Biennale Art. Its presence at Documenta was part of an ongoing agitation around the 2006 murder of immigrant Halit Yozgat by neo-Nazis. Using digital animation to recreate the internet café where the crime had taken place, the artwork carefully unspooled evidence that an undercover agent on the scene had lied under oath, and thereby may have taken part in the killing.
Highlighting Forensic Architecture’s presence at Documenta, Hili Perlson would say that its work was “stretching the definition of what may constitute an artwork.” Now, five years on, Forensic Architecture’s art-as-investigation is one of the most prominent and in-demand genres of art.
But compare 77sqm_9:26min from Documenta 14 to Airstrike on Babyn Yar (2022), on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in this Berlin Biennale. While the former investigation took eight months and built on activism ongoing since 2006, the later engages with an event that happened just three months prior: the Russian missile attack on a TV tower in Kiyv on March 1, 2022.
Forensic Architecture, Airstrike on Babyn Yar (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
“We gathered over dozens of videos, maps, and archival materials in order to study how these strikes hit not only media and communication networks but a tangled nervous system of historical references and repressed memories,” the narrator intones, in clinical voice. Airstrike on Babyn Yar goes on to detail how the Russian missile attack on the TV tower also hit the nearby Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, pointing out the symbolic significance of this fact as linking two atrocities.
But this connection was not in need of investigating, not really. 77sqm_9:26min was meaningful as an act of “counter-forensics,” a particularly resonant concept because the official German authorities investigating the murder of Halit Yozgat were potentially in league with his killers. But there is no serious “counter-forensic” aspect to Airstrike on Babyn Yar: the symbolism of attacking a Holocaust memorial was the media narrative about this event, pointed out immediately by Ukrainian President Zelensky in a Tweet after the attack as a way to shock the conscience of the world, and widely shared everywhere in outraged Western media coverage.
What, then, does Airstrike on Babyn Yar’s investigation bring to the table? Onscreen, the video shows you different clips of the missile hitting the TV tower. “With the metadata from this clip that was sent to us directly, we corrected the time stamp from other videos, and determined the time of the strike was 5:08 a.m., which matches the first reports of the strike.”
To sum up: Forensic Architecture has been able to confirm that the time of a particular Russian airstrike was… the same as the first reports of that same Russian airstrike.
My suspicion is that this work exists here not because there was something urgent to investigate—there have been far grislier and far more shocking crimes by now—but to fill a need in this Berlin Biennale to address the war in Ukraine somehow. And so, despite the performance of investigation, we’re back to the old danger of Biennale Art, with artists on call for big art events to throw together some resonant material to make a Serious Statement.

The Problem of Purpose
Susan Schuppli is associated with Forensic Architecture and is the author of Material Witness: Material, Forensics, Evidence, a book on the possibilities of art-making that interrogates how objects bear witness to various crimes. Her work Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border (2021–22) is on view at the KW Art Institute.
This work is, once again, a narrated investigation. It draws together evidence that U.S. border agents use freezing temperatures as an instrument of abuse, stating its mission as being an investigation of “a new thermo-politics defined by cold.” The facts Schuppli lays out are clear and scandalous—though also, once again, very well known to people who watch the news. (Perhaps they are more important to highlight now, when the U.S. media simply doesn’t report on the border as much as it did during the Trump administration, even as abuses go on.)
Susan Schuppli, Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border (2021-2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
But the words from Schuppli’s video narration that haunt me are the following: “despite numerous investigative reports… ‘icebox detention’ continues unabated.” If numerous professional investigative journalists and large human rights non-profits have already exposed the same facts to the public, in platforms with much bigger reach than the Berlin Biennale, what is this video hoping to add to the mix?
The project’s own description of its mission is that it “invites viewers to reflect upon the ethical imaginaries implicit in the conjoined term just-ice and by extension the experiential valence of temperature as it both interacts with and is instrumentalized by institutions, bodies, materials, and environments.”
List of sources for the data in Susan Schuppli, Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Photo by Ben Davis.
If you were being ungenerous you might suspect that the form of spectatorship that such art implies is, on average, not being chastened or informed, but the half-disavowed pleasure of recognizing oneself in its footnotes from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, and so on. “Yes, I too am the kind of person who keeps informed of such things; therefore I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am on the correct side of the moral line.”
In fact, I hope that is how most people receive it. Because if you think more deeply about Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, it literally informs its audience that the mere exposure of facts has done nothing, even as it sticks closely to the form of being an expose of facts. Its logical effect is not to rouse the audience, but to make it tune out.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Conditioning (2022) in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
Yet another artist associated with Forensic Architecture in “Still Present!” is Lawrence Abu Hamdan. His work, Air Conditioning (2022), is the first thing you encounter at the KW space. It consists of a well-researched but short informational video laying out Israel’s history of violating Lebanon’s air space over the past 15 years, based on U.N. documents. This seems an important topic, and newer terrain to me in terms of data.
In addition to the video, Abu Hamdan offers a long mural that occupies the walls of the adjoining, giant, otherwise empty gallery. Using a software that simulates clouds, a trail of artificial vapor is rendered, supposedly using the U.N. data as a basis for its fluctuating shape, so that the long ribbon of depicted clouds acts as an illustration of the history of noise pollution over Lebanon from Israeli drones and fighter jets, each centimeter being a day.
But honestly, this is just not a very compelling way to convey the visceral human impact of the material in question. Nor is it a truly useful infographic, since it doesn’t visualize any comparisons with other types of sonic environments that would give you a sense of how relatively severe the noise is. Nor is this artificial vapor plume a particularly arresting image on its own, detached from its role as data-illustration or advocacy. On all counts, the effect of Air Conditioning is nebulous. (The project’s website seems to be its currently most convincing form.)
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Conditioning (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Clouds on the Horizon
One of the few works getting consistent praise from this show, even from its critics like Isabella Zamboni, is another work about clouds: Forensic Architecture’s other video, Cloud Studies (2021), at the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg. It is actually less a single work and more of a summa of various Forensic Architecture projects from the recent past, with excerpts from different investigations the group has done threaded together with a voiceover on the theme of clouds.
Cloud Studies moves between a discussion of Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorous in Gaza, to struggles against methane gas flares from fracking sites in Argentina, to the deaths by smoke inhalation during London’s Grenfell Tower fire disaster.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
At one point, the video compares the work Forensic Architecture has done building computer models analyzing different explosions to the 19th-century tradition of “cloud atlases” created by amateur meteorologists, or to atmosphere studies created by landscape painters. But Cloud Studies‘s real point is political: the tour of Forensic Architecture’s various initiatives is, in effect, an argument that all these struggles are one: “we the citizens of toxic clouds must resist in common action.”
I agree with Forensic Architecture’s general political perspective on these different matters, I think. The video is lovely and lucid.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2021) in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
But what I realized, watching Cloud Studies a second time, is how much the video’s effect depends on that pre-existing agreement on my part. In its own description of itself, it is not doing something so ordinary as making a case: “our ‘cloud studies’ meander between shape and fog, between analysis and experience.”
The common links between, say, the suffocating pollution caused by deliberately set forest fires in Indonesia and dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chlorine gas in Syria may seem obvious within a certain progressive milieu, but not much beyond it. I’m not sure the appeal to the “citizens of toxic clouds” does any work to build tangible arguments linking different, situated, hotly contested struggles. It’s a poetic device—which is to say, artistic in the most classic sense.
In a video that condenses a variety of larger research projects into a montage, the “investigative aesthetic” becomes visible as a set of tropes: zooming in and out of maps or computer models; highlighting sections of photos or overlaying squares on details of footage; synching up different bits of footage or audio; voiceover references to algorithms, models, and computer scripts.
“Art has been very good in the last decades in problematizing the notion of truth, insisting that narratives are more complex than we’re told, that art is about doubt,” Eyal Weizman, of Forensic Architecture, said of 77sqm_9:26min five years ago. “We want to show another possibility of art—one that can confront doubt, and uses aesthetic techniques in order to interrogate.” In retrospect, it seems significant that this style of art-making gained such cachet at exactly the moment of the panic about “post-truth,” the idea that the ascendent right had somehow outflanked the postmodernists on their own terrain of epistemological doubt and narrative fragmentation.
But the pitfall, as Lisa Deml wrote in a review of Schuppli’s book Material Witness, was always that this style snuck back in a relatively unsophisticated positivism—that is, the idea that “facts speak for themselves” beyond ideology and context, so that a mythology of forensic prowess comes to stand in for making compelling images or persuasive arguments.

What the Data Says
Here’s why I’m worrying these issues now. Over at Hamburger Bahnhof again, there’s another data-journalism-as-art installation by David Chavalarias. Here we take “investigative aesthetics” to the point where Attia just literally displays a book by Chavalarias, Toxic Data, on the wall. Chavalarias does not identify as an artist; he’s a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
A book by David Chavalarias displayed in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
The bulk of his installation presents one long infographic on the gallery wall, showing color-coded data gathered from an application he has created called the Politoscope, tracking the influence of various political tendencies online over time.
Laying out years of Twitter data, the graphic shows the upward trajectory of right-wing and xenophobic presence over the last five years, which now dominates the conversation. Chillingly, Chavalarias says that he was inspired to do this work by his interest in tracking the breakdown in civic discourse leading up to the Rwandan genocide. I hope we’re not close to there yet.
David Chavalarias, Shifting Collectives (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
These are the same five years that the “investigative aesthetic” became a dominant mainstream genre of art in the institutions. The point being: Now seems like a good time to check in on some of the political communication strategies adopted in the recent past, both in the museum and out. How effective are they at getting things done? How capable are they of reaching wider audiences? And to what degree do they serve the purpose of consoling a progressive audience in its own increasing isolation within a larger culture war that it is losing?
“The 11th Berlin Biennale: Still Present!” is on view in Berlin, through September 18, 2022.
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Walking around the many spaces of Documenta 15 during its preview, I fell into and out of love with this massive show over and over again. I’m not talking about the major controversy that is currently rocking this always closely watched exhibition, which has shaken many people’s opinions of the whole thing—I’m going to get to that.
But first I want to talk about what it felt like in its opening days. If the whole thing closes over the current debates over antisemitism, we should at least have an idea of what other kinds of conversations have been cancelled out.
The exhibition is, first of all, massive—so massive that I definitely can’t say I’ve actually experienced close to all of it. Its curators, the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, invited a passel of other collectives, who then invited still more collectives and artists, who in some cases invited still more collectives and more artists. The result is a brain-busting program featuring thousands of names, spread out and packed into venues across the city, all doing different things.
The title this year is “lumbung,” a name for a collective rice barn, thus making sharing its hallmark theme. For an art viewer passing through, the effect of all this focus on collectives is, paradoxically, to render one’s experience very individual. You are just not going to have a shared experience of Documenta 15, which is too big to experience overall, designed to unfold over time, and different at every point you touch it.
Skateboarders on Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, Churning Milk Mini Ramp (2022) at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
The show is by design anti-spectacular and light on big central images. At Documenta Halle, the photographers tend to gravitate towards a fittingly ordinary display of hanging-out: a rotation of live skateboarders who lackadaisically perform on a shallow, graffiti-splattered half-pipe. This is the work of Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture from Ratchaburi, Thailand (described as a “long term alternative interdisciplinary art and community-as-case study program based on post-studio and participatory practices”), teaming up with the local Mr. Wilson Skatehalle.
That staging of two cultures coming together around a common pastime mirrors another encounter set up by Baan Noorg as part of Documenta, maybe the real heart of their contribution: a commercial exchange between local dairy producers in Kassel and the town of Nongpho, advertised in a video above the half pipe.
Installation by Britto Arts Trust at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
Nearby, a mural fills the space with images appropriated from Bengali films by Dhaka-based nonprofit the Britto Arts Trust. In addition, group members have created a bazaar-like display, in the form of a series of stalls stocked with ingenious ceramic and crocheted replicas of everyday food items.
A short walk away at the natural history museum, a show about rural life by a Spanish collective, INLAND, gives way to a grotto full of AI-generated cave art and a characteristically digressive and trippy video by Hito Steyerl that tells the story of a modern-day shepherd who is part of the INLAND collective. (Steyerl and INLAND also collaborate on a crypto-currency parody called “cheesecoin” that proposes creating an “internet of stink.” More importantly, you can also sample INLAND cheese on site.)
Works by Erick Beltrán at the Museum für Sepulkralkultur. Photo by Ben Davis.
At the Museum of Sepulchral Culture, Spanish artist Erick Beltrán’s complex, didactic installation Manifold (2022) is drawn from workshops he did with Kassel residents on what “power” might look like. It’s heady—though I admit I find the diagrams and word clouds illustrating the relationship between the positive value of “multiplicity” and the baleful, modern and Western concept of “unity” not really clarifying.
At the Stadtsmuseum, Sydney-based Safdar Ahmed presents Border Farce (2022). The two-channel video cuts between the testimony of Kazem Kazemi, an Iranian refugee who was detained in scandalous conditions on Australia’s Manus Island, with intense, psychedelic, and cathartic visuals by Hazeen, an “anti-racist Muslim death metal band” the artist formed, which also features Kazemi.
Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi, YATAI TRIP PROJECT – road to documenta (2021-2022) in Karlswiese (Karlsaue). Photo by Ben Davis.
Out in Karlsaue park, in the large green swath in front of the Orangerie, there’s a tent by Chinese artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun propagandizing the sustainable virtues of yak hair; a large structure, Return to Sender (2022), made of bales of textile waste that tries to confront the German audience with the extent of First World over-consumption by Nest Collective from Nairobi, Kenya; and a functional, make-shift sauna in the form of the Fukushima nuclear reactor brought to you by Japan’s Cinema Caravan, “a group of primates in the Good Vibes Hominidae family.”

Community Art and Community as Art
The projects of Documenta 15 often open onto past works of community-building or research, present pedagogical initiatives, or future processes unfolding during the 100 days of the show or beyond. A lot of it felt to me not like an art biennial, but like an art education biennial—with the strengths and weaknesses this implies. (Indeed, one prominent participant is CAMP notes on education, a collective that sprung from Documenta’s education and outreach department.)
Camp Notes on Education, CAMP Space (2022) at Hafenstraße 76. Photo by Ben Davis.
Documenta 15 is full of activity tables, banners exhorting self-reflection and inclusivity, designated chill-out zones for the neurodivergent, childcare spaces for parents, community kiosks selling crafts and vinyl records, collaborative printmaking studios, participatory oral history projects, homages to composting and beekeeping (or, more specifically, a daft combination of beekeeping and cryptocurrency mining).
Objects are generally makeshift, unexalted, approachable. In film, the vibe is educational, with voiceover or talking heads soberly explaining historical events or topical concerns.
Ruangrupa emerged in the 2000s out of Indonesia’s grassroots, artist-driven, post-dictatorship art scene. Documenta 15’s framework suggests the massive exhibition as an attempt to showcase egalitarian survival strategies and community initiatives from the Global South (only a single group amid the sprawling program, Black Quantum Futurism, hails from the United States). The concept of “lumbung” is offered as a resource to “heal today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal structures.”
Community garden by Nhà Sàn Collective at WH22. Photo by Ben Davis.
And yet… review the types of initiatives most celebrated here: children’s theater, puppets, workshops on tolerance and stereotypes, street festivals, tributes to scrappy local enterprise, and, above all, community gardening and archives preserving various kinds of marginalized or endangered cultures (the last being the two major pillars of Documenta 15’s aesthetic program).
None of these are particularly beyond the pale for the typical German or U.S. are viewer. They are just more or less the accepted aesthetic preferences of international NGO culture, which values tangible deliverables and loves to produce texts with the word “community” in them. Indeed, almost all these works come with a label that explains what government agency or foundation has helped support them.
Video display for the Question of Funding laying out a pitch for Dayra.net. Photo by Ben Davis.
The Palestinian collective the Question of Funding actually has a video and associated brochure that directly critiques the ways that art philanthropy tends to produce cultures of dependency and limit political horizons. Unexpectedly to me, it turned not into a political call to change neocolonial funding structures but a call for Palestinians to use a blockchain-based service, Dayra.net, that allows participants to swap in-kind services. (Between this and Center for Art and Urbanistics’s “Beecoin,” Documenta 15 marks the arrival of blockchain at the highest level of the non-commercial side of the international art world.)
Much of the justificatory text here about sharing and cooperation as a new model of co-habitation that challenges neoliberalism and colonialism seems to me to mistake effects for causes. Things aren’t unsustainable, either in art or more broadly, because of a bad mindset. If all the artists in Kassel learn to better share the collective pool—and I’m not dismissing this, it’s a good thing—you are still left with the main problem: that a tiny group of the world’s population controls a vast majority of its wealth and resources, and has it in its interests to keep it that way.
Lumbung Kiosk, a functional community shop, at work in Hübner-areal. Photo by Ben Davis.
The major problem is not an abstract “Western” habit of thought, like “hierarchy” or “individualism,” which you can fix by turning to collaboration. These are deflections of the kind that the non-profit world inculcates, as Anand Giridharadas argues in Winners Take All, because non-profit culture functions by reframing the “political as personal,” turning systemic problems into things that can be solved via workshops, at the level of interpersonal dynamics or clever bootstrap initiatives.
As ruangrupa would also admit, I think, the ascription of an inherently collective form of wisdom to the “non-Western” subject has its own history of “othering” undertones, acknowledged fitfully throughout the show. For instance, one of the many banners stating pedagogical principles hung by *foundationClass collective at the Hafenstraße 76 space features an (ironically anonymous) statement demanding an end to “the narrative of every German cultural institutions [sic] that only acknowledge us collectively and never as individuals worthy of self expression.”
Banner by *foundationClass collective. Photo by Ben Davis.

Worth Celebrating
If I found myself enjoying the “lumbung” vibe despite reservations, it’s because, leaving aside the bigger questions about how viable or radical its proposals for new models for art are, ruangrupa’s focus on sociality just made for a show that feels very approachable and alive. And the particular network-of-networks that ruangrupa has pulled in genuinely feels like it knits together artistic scenes that are vital and under-known. They do have the popular touch.
The cadre of artists associated with Haiti’s Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists), at the church of St. Kunigundis, beautifully commanded that space (I gather from a Times article that getting them permission to work in Germany required special attention). André Eugène’s elemental and unsettling sculptures incorporating human skulls dotted the floor, Edouard Duval-Carrié’s portraits of historic leaders of Haiti cut from blue mirrors commanded the walls, and Lafleur and Bogaert’s kinetic sculptures felt both like celebrations of everyday creativity and otherworldly.
Works from Malgorzata Mirga-Tas’s “Out of Egypt” series on view at the Fridericianum. Photo by Ben Davis.
At the Frederiecanium, inter-leafed throughout the various floors was a display showcasing recent work by artists from Roma backgrounds. It included Birth, a wild, historically important, multi-panel painting of a Roma origin myth by Tamás Péli from 1983; Damian le Bas’s 2013 painting Safe European Home, a map of Europe rendered as a strange, interlocking mosaic of faces; and Malgorzata Mirga-Tas’s recent “Out of Egypt” series (2021) of embroidered panels appropriating cliched images from 17th century etchings depicting the Roma people as lost Egyptian tribes, using textiles upcycled from clothing worn by the artist’s present-day Roma community.
Also in the Frederiecanium, one screening room focuses on the legacy of Sada, a collective set up in 2011 to support artists and students in post-occupation Iraq, so completely memory-holed in the U.S. after official military withdrawal. The group’s founder Rijin Sahakian has a film essay that lucidly lays out how recent U.S. culture was shaped by the recent geopolitical crime. Her work has a sense for the darkly resonant image that makes the charges stick, but it’s also memorably direct, without poeticizing its subject.
Visitors watching Wakaliga Uganda’s Football Kommando at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
On a totally different wavelength, I liked Football Kommando, from Wakaliga Uganda, a beyond-low-budget studio based outside of Kampala founded by Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana, a.k.a. Nabwana IGG. At one end of Documenta Halle, you enter the screening room past walls studded by homemade posters for the studio’s various adventure movies. A spy caper, Football Kommando tells the tale of a German footballer teaming up with an ass-kicking Ugandan mother, bringing his prowess with a soccer ball to a mission to rescue her kidnapped daughter. It’s fun. It’s also unlike anything I have seen at a biennial before.

The Only Conversation That Matters
I mention the questions the show raises about its artistic framework as well as the real highlights because I think both deserve space that the current meltdown is destined to make impossible. I said I hadn’t seen the whole show. Clearly, the curators hadn’t either.
A slow-moving storm of criticism had haunted the show in the weeks leading up to it, touched off by a local blog decrying the “left-identitarian and postmodern art world,” and presenting any criticism of Israel—or public sympathy for Palestinians—as de facto antisemitic. As the charges of antisemitism circulated more generally in the German press, the bulk of the case was that the show featured many Palestinian artists talking about their plights, but no Israeli-Jewish artists; and that some artists in the show had signed various petitions in support of boycotting Israel or against Germany’s 2019 parliamentary motion conflating boycotts of Israel with antisemitism. (In the United States, a measure outlawing boycotts of Israel is probably heading to the Supreme Court.)
But shortly after the opening of Documenta 15, observers discovered antisemitic caricatures within a large banner shown in the main plaza in front of the main Frederiecanium site by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi. The 2002 work, People’s Justice, was a four-story-tall, scabrous tableau. It depicts the struggle between the heroic Indonesian people, shown on the right side as a flow of figures surging into battle beneath a banner that says “Resistance Culture Movement,” against the dictatorship of the then-recently deposed Suharto regime and the international forces that had supported it, illustrated on the left.
People’s Justice by the Indonesian artists group Taring Padi hangs behind cardboard figures at the Documenta 15 on June 18, 2022 in Kassel, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)
Suharto is depicted in a red suit with lizard eyes at the top left, seated on a throne beneath a tower bearing the flags of the United States and Great Britain, with war planes soaring past them into the skies. At bottom left, an immense skull with bloodshot eyes is accompanied by a banner that reads “The Expansion of ‘Multicultural’ State Hegemony.”
Amid this fetid landscape of evil cartoons, it’s hard to take in every detail. You see a grinning king fornicating with a crying woman who is also a windup doll. You see a grotesque fat figure with a beast’s snout, wearing a songkok, stuffing his face with a giant sandwich, pants busting open. You see a see a garishly made-up beauty queen, nipples projecting through her top, whose sash reads “Plastiks.” You see a drooling man hypnotized by a TV labeled “PROPAGANDA BOX.”
Near the front, there is a commando with a pig face, sporting a red beret and a U.S. flag patch, masturbating onto a grave covered in skulls with one hand and giving the thumbs up with the other. Running to join him is a line of helmeted, beast-faced storm troopers, led by a duo labeled “007” and “KGB.” About midway back in this line of troopers, just in front of a figure labeled “ASIO” (the Australian intelligence service), is a figure labeled “MOSSAD” and bearing the Star of David, also with a pig face.
Detail of the mural People’s Justice by the Indonesian artist group Taring Padi. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)
Nearby is a an evil wolf with a blood-soaked mouth with a talking balloon saying “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” a towering devil-clown applauding the storm troopers—and beside these, a tiny image of a cigar-chomping, fanged man with sidelocks, clearly a caricature of an Orthodox Jew, with a Nazi “SS” on his hat.
Whatever its background in expressing visceral rage at international forces tied to Suharto’s historic crimes—and Israel really did deal weapons to Suharto—People’s Justice clearly evokes antisemitic imagery.
When the scandal broke, the work was first covered and then taken down; the artists and curators apologized; and matters have escalated from there, with plans for a systematic review of the show for antisemitism and calls for the head of both Documenta and the German culture minister to step down, and for the show to be shuttered altogether.
Taring Padi is a storied activist collective with undefined membership that is known to “reject the notion of art for art’s sake,” as the Jakarta Post put it, very much in the politicized and grassroots vibe that is closest to ruangrupa’s heart. They are very prominent in Documenta 15—maybe the most prominent presence.
Cardboards, a work of the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, at the Friedrichsplatz square in front of the Fridericianum Museum, one of the venues of Documenta 15 in Kassel. Photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images.
Their cardboard signs featuring cartoons and social justice slogans about various causes, staked into the ground, filled the main site of the show, while an entire venue, Hallenbad Ost, was dedicated to a retrospective of their political graphics and banners.
That show is called “Flame of Solidarity: First They Came for Them, Then They Came for Us.” That’s a reference to Martin Niemöller’s famous 1946 poem about the rise of Nazism. “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew…”
As Jörg Heiser noted at Art Agenda, a critical essay archived on Taring Padi’s own website pointed out that how the satire of their political graphics “tend to reproduce the common, normative, and stereotypical messages” of Indonesian society, in particular when “depicting the physical and stereotypical attributes of religious, racial, and ethnic diversity.” The danger of something dire like this happening is actually the flip side of the curatorial emphasis on demotic, “popular” culture: The more that aperture opens, the more chance you have to reckon with tropes and stereotypes that a more carefully sterilized academic culture brackets out, because “popular consciousness” is not unilaterally righteous or pure.
I sort of agree, then, with an essay by curator Mohammad Salemy (though not with his title, “Antisemitism Is the Least of Documenta’s Problems”), when he says that in some sense this scandal grows out of the entire delegated curatorial framework of Documenta 15. Assuming for a minute that neither Taring Padi nor ruangrupa were attempting to dog-whistle to neo-Nazis with People’s Justice, the work simply would not have been shown in a more carefully curated show.
But the work was shown. The fallout will be immense.
“Documenta 15: Lumbung” is on view in Kassel, Germany, through September 25, 2022.
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