An Exhibition for the Twenty-First Century: The (Anti-)Curatorial Model of Documenta Fifteen

This article offers a close analysis of documenta fifteen (2022, curated by Ruangrupa) in terms of its (anti-)curatorial organizational and economic structure, its operation from the Global South and its insistence on questions of infrastructure and survival. It situates the exhibition theoretically and critically within the history of the documenta, the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art and the discursive position of global postcolonial exhibitions, and sees it as both a culmination and an inversion of these trajectories. It therefore argues that documenta fifteen is a prominent site for a broad discussion of the possibility of critical artistic and social action in the present moment.