Documenta 14 Announces Details of Cultural Exchange Between Athens and Kassel
Today, Documenta 14 and its Athens-based partner, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), held their first press conference in Kassel to reveal details about the concept for this year’s exhibition. As Adam Szymczyk, Documenta’s artistic director, introduced the conference, he said that the collaboration between Athens and Kassel is “far more profound than we could have expected.” EMST will host the largest Documenta exhibition in Athens and, in turn, will loan works from its contemporary Greek and international collection, ranging from the 1960s to the present, to the Fridericianum in Kassel.
From April 8 to July 16, Documenta 14 will showcase a wide range of newly commissioned artworks at the recently renovated EMST building, a former brewery conceived by the visionary Greek architect Takis Zenetos in collaboration with Margaritis Apostolidis in 1961. Curator Monika Szewczyk said “the incredible factory building,” which was designed along a horizontal axis and meant to be extendable without interrupting production, inspired the exhibition. The show will revolve around the idea of a libidinal economy and aims to rethink production processes, materials, and currencies as both social and public flows.
Opening on June 10 and running through September 17, an exhibition of more than two hundred artworks from the EMST collection, including major works by Stephen Antonakos, Vlassis Caniaris, Bia Davou, Mona Hatoum, and Jannis Kounellis, will be presented at the Fridericianum. It will be supervised by EMST curators Tina Pandi and Stamatis Schizakis.
