CRITICAL FABULATIONS OF DOCUMENTA

Free admission, registration is required at: standop[at]documenta-institut[dot]de
The symposium will be held in English.

The program can be found here.

The symposium Critical Fabulations of documenta is dedicated to the gaps, omissions and suppressed histories in the narratives surrounding documenta. These gaps are not understood as deficits, but as productive starting points for new perspectives on its history. The focus is on those voices, images and narratives that were marginalized, overlooked or never fully visible in the official histories of the exhibition. Instead of looking for a linear or closed narrative of documenta, the symposium asks how it is possible to work with ruptures, contradictions and gaps. What forms of knowledge, narration and curatorial action can emerge from this?

Based on Saidiya Hartman's concept of Critical Fabulation, the symposium combines art historical research, archival work, curatorial practice and storytelling. Hartman proposes using the gaps in the historical record as a creative starting point and counteracting the silence of the archive. Critical Fabulation offers the opportunity to question dominant narratives and test alternative forms of historiography and curatorial practice. The aim is not to definitively close gaps or to formulate counter-histories in the sense of a complete correction. Rather, the focus is on the conditions under which history is told, remembered and made visible.

The symposium deals specifically with geopolitical tensions, institutional narratives and the mechanisms of global visibility that have shaped the history of documenta since its inception. The focus is on questions of absence and non-participation, repressed political contexts, unrealized exhibitions and alternative historical possibilities. At the same time, it examines how museums, archives and exhibition institutions can themselves become sites of speculative and fictional practice: as spaces in which the past is not only reconstructed, but re-imagined. Following Saidiya Hartman, an attempt is made not only to imagine what was, but also what could have been.