Chiara Fumai, <i>Shut Up. Actually, Talk (The world will not explode)</i>, 2012, Group performance on the roof of the Fridericianum featuring Zalumma Agra and the Stars of the East, words by Carla Lonzi (“Let’s Spit on Hegel,” 1970) and Rivolta Femminile (“I Say I,” 1977), costumes by Antonio Piccirilli, 60 min., Courtesy Chiara Fumai, Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) and produced with the support of Fiorucci Art Trust, London. Photo: Henrik Stromberg

“The dance was very frenetic,  lively, rattling, clanging,  rolling, contorted,  and lasted for a long time”

Photo: Rosa Maria Rühling

September 16, 2012 marked the final day of the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition.

After 100 days open to the public the total number of visitors in Kassel was 905,000, amounting to 110,000 additional visitors or a 14% increase from the previous edition of documenta in 2007.

An additional 27,000 people visited the dOCUMENTA(13) exhibition held in Kabul from June 20 to July 19, 2012, bringing the total number of visitors to 887,000.

An exhibition is an unfolding organism, like a vegetable bud. It comes from intuitions, then it forms an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge; like a plant—which contains in itself many other living entities—it has roots, buds and fruit.  After four years of preliminary encounters, seminars and preparations, after a 100-day exhibition and other activities in Kassel, a series of seminars and a 30-day exhibition in Kabul, an 8-day seminar in Alexandria, and a 14-day retreat in Banff, dOCUMENTA (13) closed in Kassel on Sunday, September 16, 2012, at 8 pm. On June 9, 2012, when the exhibition opened in Kassel, we said that dOCUMENTA (13) was dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory. We said these were terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary, and that dOCUMENTA (13) was driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth, a vision that is shared with, and recognizes, the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people.  And now we add that an exhibition could be thought of as a pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without itself. A bliss able to go beyond the aporias of the subject and the object—an experience of life no longer dependent on the first, nor submitted to the latter. Art is ceaselessly posed in life. And this indefinite life posed in art allows us to grasp the lived and living, to understand life as carried by the events, and by the singularities actualized in subject/objects. Art does not just come after life, but rather it offers the immensity of a temporality constituting spaces where one sees the event yet to come in the absolute of an immediate consciousness. 

documenta 14 will open to the public on Saturday, June 10, 2017.