More details are slowly being revealed about documenta 14, which opens on April 8 in Athens, and June 10 in Kassel.
At a press conference on Tuesday, curator Adam Szymczyk and Athens mayor Giorgos Kaminis announced the venues for the exhibition taking place in the Greek capital. The bulk of the show will take place at the long-awaited, newly-opened National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Athens-Macedonian News Agency reports.
Other venues include three branches of the Benaki Museum: the Museum of Islamic Art, the Pireos Street Annex, and the Ghika Gallery; the School of Fine Arts, the Megaron Concert Hall, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, the Greek Film Archive, the Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies, the Romantso Club, and the Athens Conservatoire, which housed the National Museum of Contemporary Art while the new building was under construction.
The Avdi, Kotzia, and Syntagma Squares will also act as exhibition spaces, confirming that public space will factor largely into this year’s edition in both cities—Szymczyk previously said that in Kassel, Friedrichsplatz will “play a big role,” and an obelisk is already being installed at Königsplatz.
While the artist list won’t be revealed before the opening, some details about what will be on display are trickling in, too.
The Art Newspaper reports that avant-garde artist Jonas Mekas will show a series of around 30 photographs that he took as a young man while living in displaced persons camps in Germany between the years 1945 and 1948.
The Lithuanian-born artist will show snapshots of “the barracks, the people arriving, leaving, hanging around; German children scrounging for food in garbage cans; miseries of the displaced persons camps life,” in both Athens and Kassel.
And in the first “oops” moment of documenta 14, sound artist Samson Young, who will represent Hong Kong at the 2017 Venice Biennale, has already updated his CV to reveal that he will take part in documenta as well. So no surprise there, then…