VelozDove684

guide to documenta newartnetwork.net/documenta - A light but relentless breeze, courtesy of British artist Ryan Gander, blows with the Fridericianum in Kassel, one of many world's oldest museums. Three small sculptures by Julio Gonzáles, first shown at the second Documenta show in 1959, stand in the draught. It is the wind of history, an air of uncertainty and impermanence. We're blown about.

review here - Kassel's background Germany's are unavoidable at Documenta 13, which opened on Saturday. The show fills the city, in the stop to Karlsaue park, from Kassel's museums to the theatres and cinemas, from houses to hotel ballrooms. Documenta happens every 5 years, lasts 100 days, and features 200 artists. You may even be tempted to travel further: to Kabul, where an Afghan outpost of the exhibition continues; or Alexandria, Cairo and Banff, where more related events take place.

newartnetwork.net/documenta - Tacita Dean has brought the forest of Afghanistan to Kassel, filling a former banking hall with enormous, beautiful blackboard drawings. Some are near-empty, just turbid blackness; other people are filled up with moiling rapids and rushing rivers. You can find sunlit mountaintops, dusty avalanches, chalky wipe-outs. The six panels really are a type of storyboard, an evocation of your elsewhere. Dean's drawings are, I think, about time: geological time, the flash of your life, a passing thought. "I'll just keep on till I recieve it right," sings Tammy Wynette, in a snatch of song by Ceal Floyer. Again and again Wynette sings the phrase. Inside a nearby room hang still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, among a number of the vessels and objects he painted and repainted, year in year out, as part of his dusty room in Bologna. Morandi was always doing exactly the same thing, but always making it new. Documenta is full of such interruptions: new and ancient things, the living and the dead, mysteries and miseries.