DBritish artist Hamja Ahsan doesn’t need much to become public enemy number one in Germany: maybe two or three articles in the “Bild” newspaper – and on Wednesday morning, in a small YouTube video, the artist spoke to the Axel Springer-Presse for having made him the “best-known British artist” in Germany, as he thinks (Damien Hirst would take a more differentiated view of it). Incidentally, in the same video, Ahsan also demands that Jürgen Klopp, the coach of Liverpool FC, finally become head of the Documenta: not only because Klopp is, rightly so, the most popular German in the whole world. But also because Klopp has shown how irresistible the results are when people of all races and religions work on a joint project under his leadership.
Ahsan is a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin and a Documenta participant, which he puts as the first of his characteristics on his Twitter profile. The “Bild” newspaper reviled him as a “Documenta ‘artist'” – and these are good reasons to also place Hamja Ahsan’s tweets under the art reservation. An art that doesn’t understand “image”, so the working hypothesis would have to go, can’t actually be all that bad.
