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Documenta’s Anti-Semitism Controversy, Explained: How a German Art Show Became the Year’s Most Contentious Exhibition

Documenta 15, this year’s edition of the famed art show that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, was initially greeted with a mix of faint praise and confusion when it opened last month. Then things took a turn for the worse when, just as the 100-day show began welcoming the public, a controversy began over a large-scale, outdoor mural that featured anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews.

Though the mural was swiftly removed by Documenta, the scandal surrounding it has lingered on at the exhibition. German politicians have dug into Documenta, questioning how the work made it on view, and the show could potentially receive less state funding for future iterations as a result. Meanwhile, others have bemoaned a lack of dialogue amid the controversy, and one exhibiting artist even pulled her work.

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In the days after Documenta’s opening, one work immediately generated a windfall of controversy. Taring Padi’s People’s Justice (2002) is a towering piece that appeared in the Friedrichsplatz, one of Documenta’s most prominent venues and a central town square of Kassel. The 26-foot-tall mural is an epic depiction of various historical events in Indonesia, where the collective hails from. Created 20 years ago for the 2002 South Australian Art Festival in Adelaide, the work charts a period of Indonesian history spanning from the 1960s to the turn of the century. It was unlike others presented in this edition of Documenta as it was not a newly commissioned project.

One particular focus of the mural is the genocide of 1965, in which hundreds of thousands of Communists, leftists, Gerwani women, Chinese people, Javanese Abangan people, and more were murdered by state-operated forces. The mural alludes to some historians’ claims that Israeli intelligence helped the regime of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, conduct the genocide. The genocide ultimately gave way to a coup that led to the rise of Suharto, who held a dictatorship in the country for over 30 years, until his resignation in 1998, the year that Taring Padi formed.

Read more:

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/what-is-documenta-15-antisemitism-controversy-1234635001/

Warning: the link shows the anti-Semitic imagery.