Just steps from the tram stop that takes you from the train station to Friedrichsplatz in the city of Kassel, Germany, is a square from which several pathways radiate toward a number of severe looking buildings. If it wasn’t for the family of Thomas Schutte’s brightly glazed ceramics perched on the roof of one, or the symphony of metal and glass emerging from the corner of another, you would never know that these buildings – from June 16 until September 23 – house Documenta XII, widely considered to be the world’s most important contemporary art exhibition.

Stangers, by Thomas Schutte. Made for Documenta 9. Image: commons.wikimedia.org

Documenta has taken place in Kassel more or less every five years since 1955, when the painter and professor Arnold Bode, together with historian Werner Haftmann presented a retrospective of classical Modernism that had been defamed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ art, alongside younger artworks. 130,000 visitors attended that year and by the 1960s, the show had become well established as the “Museum of one hundred days”.

Every five years, the city’s hotels book up months in advance of the opening preview, forcing some unlucky foreign journalists, VIP collectors, European art intellectuals, curators and museum directors to stay in surrounding towns. They wander around, maps in hand, while this year, curiously, a large contingent of Chinese citizens have been brought over from China for one month as guests of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han dynasty urn (detail), 1995. Image: visualarts.qld.gov.au

His ‘experimental study’, entitled A Fairy Tale is a reference to the Brothers Grimm who wrote many of their stories in Kassel. The idea is to produce a non-violent, highly visible encounter between two cultures in a specific place.

An image from Snow White and Rose Red, by the Brothers Grimm. Image: snowwhiteandrosered.com

Why go to Documenta? If, as Marshall McLuhan said, art can be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it, then the Documenta team who, along with their International Committee and advisory board of forty local experts, have spent three and a half years scouring the globe for today’s most relevant artists, should offer up some intriguing food for thought.

As indeed they have. After the last Documenta, which was criticized for Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor’s heavy-handed approach, this year’s show is considerably lighter and more colourful.

Okwui Enwezor. Image: universes-in-universe.de

Artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack have created an intentionally open-ended exhibition. Artworks from Bucharest to New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro to Beijing, from the 14th century to today – including textile, installation works, painting, drawing, video and sculpture – are set against vibrant walls of burnt orange, blue and deep green. There is much to engage the viewer, whether expert or neophyte.

Documenta XII artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack. Image: artnet.de

With no definitive beginning or end, the show began (for me) on the top floor of the main building, the Museum Fridericianum. Toronto artist Luis Jacob’s installation Album III (2004) consists of laminated plaques of disparate images – dancers in motion, textiles, architecture, social actions and sculptural forms – lining the walls. At the centre, a video installation paired contemporary dance with sign language.

Toronto artist Luis Jacob. Image: torontohispano.com

It was a piece about interpretation, and it was a fitting start, echoing a series of similarly categorized photographs entitled Analogue 1998-2007 by New Yorker Zoë Leonard that ended the show in the Aue Pavilion, a temporary structure set in a meadow near a spectacular 18th century Orangerie.

An image from Zoe Leonard’s series Analogue. Image: wexarts.org

In between, much of the work explored perspectives of cultural experience through art. Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook, who won Canada’s 2006 Sobey Art Prize, showed a number of her drawings depicting modern daily life in the Arctic. As the catalogue text notes, “Pootoogook is among the first artists in her community to have been raised in two different worlds.”

Annie Pootoogook, Domestic Scene. Image: drawingsociety.com

One work that seemed to encapsulate the show’s central idea of drawing links between varying social and cultural perspectives, was the documentaion of the project For Every Dog a Different Master (2007), by the Czech artist Katerina Seda.

Seda, who grew up in one of several grey concrete tower blocks in the Czech city of Brno-Lisen, was familiar with residents there not acknowledging one another. Then in 2002, nearby towers were re-painted in bright colours. In an effort to introduce a sense of community, and inspired by the refurbished buildings, she designed a fabric and crafted shirts, which she arranged to have delivered to residents in one building, ostensibly from residents in another. She then stepped away from the plan, allowing the transfer of the shirts to facilitate communication between residents in the town.

Katerina Seda, There’s Nothing There, (Video) 2003. Image: cogcollective.co.uk

With Documenta XII, the curators have likewise presented possibilities for introductions between the artworks, the viewer and vice versa, and have stepped aside, as the catalogue states of Seda, “so as not to hamper residents from coming together as intended.”