Documenta's Relevance to the International Art Biennials as Instances of Dealing with Artistic Archives

From the perspective of Chinese contemporary art museums, Documenta's and other biennials' development over last century can appear distant. However, the recent trans-nationalization of the gallery and museum institutions of the country that until a generation ago was still considered an opponent of the Western bloc, China, together with other Asian countries, undergoes the process of re-evaluation it its cultural archive with the purpose of making it readable on a global scale.

The influx of the curators from around the worlds to the projects that numerous museums in mainland China, as well as in its major cities, heralds a process of coming to terms with difficult past that these institutions have inherited as they confront radical change in the conditions of what can be possible in exhibiting, commenting, and curating. This period of relative freedom finds echo in the situation in which Documenta in Kassel, Germany, has started its operation in 1955.

Half a century later this five-year biennial has grown into truly global phenomenon that not everyone hails in positive terms. The shadows of imperialistic past haunt the intentions to encompass in a single urban location the breadth of the contemporary moment. Whether the problematics of staging of the artworks that have challenged successive exhibiting and curating committees of Documenta completely displace the question of artistic archive into the theoretical shadows of its international exhibitions remains important to the extent that there are lessons that international biennials elsewhere can draw from it.

Every biennial in its media presence, list of participants, and institutional relevance of its themes has the international dimension in-built into its mode of operation. At the same time, the comparative perspective has to recognize the process whereby the international art biennial has turned into institution with its distinct set of expectations, forms of support, and relevance to kindred discourses that bring every international art exhibition into communication with all others that share with it positions on the relational field of artistic events.

That this field stretches from the local to the global scale speaks of the transformation in the large context in which artworks and the spaces where they become public are frequently called to reflect, to act upon, or to make a statement about. Even where the discussions around modernism, avant-garde movements, and multiple reactions to these seem foreign, the quality of exploration of what portends to be shared condition remains promising as societies the world over attempt to come to terms with risks, flows, and imaginaries that know no borders.

In this respect the coincidence of the international art exhibition with the change in the mode of capitalist regulation may prove more fortuitous than strictly causal as so many spatially and temporally contingent factors are at play in each instance where centers and peripheries, post-colonies and post-empires, and linguas francas and vernaculars meet.