Revisiting documenta 14’s magazine South as a State of Mind: On ‘Southerness’ in contemporary art and theory

Abstract

The fourteenth edition of documenta, the international exhibition of contemporary art, introduced in the cultural field of Greece a strong statement about the country being part of the Global South. Traditionally, documenta takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel. Yet the fourteenth iteration in 2017, titled ‘Learning from Athens’, was equally split between Kassel and Athens. As documenta is considered the world’s most important manifestation of contemporary art, already for more than two decades its artistic directors try to make the exhibition project globally relevant. As every edition, so also the fourteenth, was accompanied by several publications that constructed a rich theoretical framework. Four years after the exhibition project’s finissage, this article revisits the magazine of documenta 14, titled South as a State of Mind, in order to reflect on the conception of the terms ‘South’ and ‘Global South’ proposed there in relation to the situated Athens-based perspective. As the documenta 14 motto reassured, this was an exercise in ‘learning from Athens’ between 2013 and 2017: how productive did this perspective render conceptualizations of the South for the past, present or future? And what role did the intense context of the 2010s in Greece play in such conceptualizations, in the midst of the country’s sovereign debt crisis, waves of refugees and social and political turmoil?