ללמוד עם הדרום הגלובלי: דוקומנטה חמש-עשרה והתערוכה של המאה ה-21

This article takes the discussion of documenta 15 back from the anti-Semitism scandal that overtook the discourse surrounding the exhibition and reduced it to a single quintessentially German issue, thereby returning it to the familiar European artistic arrays, back to the exhibition itself and the developments that occurred therein. Against its common understanding as a decolonial exhibition that presents different issues of the Global South, we argue that documenta 15 is unique not because of its contents and claims but by its arrays and modes of operation: the distribution of resources to the different projects, the turning away from the exhibition as an artistic display, and ruangrupa’s anti-curating strategy. We demonstrate how the exhibition was related to several important processes in the art world of the last decades – criticism of the museal institution, participation, social art and global art – and how it continued and exhausted them but also how it exceeded them, the politics of representation of identities, and social theories of antagonism and conflict, upon which those processes were based. Instead, we indicate three deflections that occurred in the exhibition: from the urban to the rural, from the written to the oral, and from the participatory to the ritual. All three overturned the modern paradigms of development and most of the critical writing about them and turned documenta 15 into an artistic event that does not carry the banner of criticism of the West yet again, but rather opens possibilities for positive artistic and social action under conditions of political oppression, economic exploitation, and a shortage of existential resources, thereby marking the way from the Global South to the whole world.