Ms. Alfandari, Mr. Mendel – you called the conversations you had at your Documenta stand on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel crisis intervention. What did you learn there?
Meron Mendel: There was everything from insightful comments to savage abuse. After the Documenta rejected formats for exchange with the artists, we opted for this more spontaneous dialogue with the audience.
Julia Alfandar: We started this on the day when the image of Taring Padi was covered with the anti-Semitic imagery. It was amazing to me how much the perception of the visitors differed from the media reflection. Many at the stand accused us – whoever that meant – of having exercised censorship by taking down the pictures. It was criticized that the entire documenta was completely trashed because of a few “few anti-Semitic motives”. And parallels were drawn with the National Socialists’ approach to unwanted art. Again and again it was said that nobody should be surprised that the Documenta had gotten into an anti-Semitism debate with artists from the Global South. At the same time, artists and curators were protected with a paternalistic, almost neo-colonial argument: given their background, they couldn’t know any better
The German audience was not without suspicion!
Alfandar: However. The talks showed how deeply rooted anti-Semitism is in German society. It was a predominantly German audience that came to our stand and in some cases expressed completely crude ideas in conversation.
Head of political education at the Anne Frank educational institution: Julia Alfandari
:
Image: Florian Menath
What were those ideas?
Alfandar: Very often the accusation came that the Jews were an extremely influential force that also aimed to destroy the documenta. Some were bothered by the fact that, in their view, everything revolved around the sensitivities of Jews in Germany. One said that the Germans let themselves be flogged by them and that this had to end. According to another conspiracy story, the conflict over the images with anti-Semitic connotations was a controlled action by the Mossad, and the Indonesian artists are actually agents of the Israeli secret service in order to distract attention from the murder of a Palestinian journalist.
Mendel: The accusation that the politicians had damaged the Documenta in order to take it away from the city of Kassel and bring it to Berlin was also voiced. Although the media had worked this out well, we realized once again how much ignorance there is about what anti-Semitic imagery even is. So we said to ourselves: Okay, there really is still a big gap that needs to be filled.
You spoke to about a thousand visitors. What will follow from the talks and will there be an evaluation?
Mendel: What was initially intended as a crisis intervention, not to make a study out of it, will now be incorporated into one that we are preparing in September with the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and the Documenta Institute in Kassel about Documenta 15 .
What is this study aimed at?
Mendel: We consider this documenta to be exemplary, especially when the discussion failed. That’s what we want to investigate. How two camps met and boosted each other. The first spoke up in advance and warned – as we now know, rightly – of possible anti-Semitism in Kassel. At the same time, there was a lot of generalization involved, because the premise was that artists from the Global South were supposed to be anti-Semites. The other camp also worked with generalizations insofar as anti-Semitism was only a pretext for them to take action against Documenta 15. So while one side flatly denied any sign of anti-Semitism in Kassel, the other saw anti-Semitism everywhere all along.
