Goshka Macuga and Maria Loboda are Polish artists based today in Poland. They are among the group hand-selected by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, with whom a number of international art publications have taken issue given the far-flung ambitions and lack of concrete direction. The overarching theme comes from the trauma of war, drawn from Kassel's own painful history under the Nazis - yet the ways in which the theme is explored sometimes stray rather far from the source. Such titles as the New York Times and Art Agenda have remarked upon the overflowing roster of artists and the panoply of works presented. The NYT's Roberta Smith calls this year's Documenta
alternately inspiring - almost visionary - and insufferable, innovative and predictable, meticulous and sentimentally precious. I would not have missed this seething, shape-shifting extravaganza for the world, and I’d rather not see its like again, at least not on this dwarfing, imperious, self-canceling scale.
According to Documenta organisers, the event is "dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory. These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary".
The main part of the exhibition is located within the Fridericianum space in the centre of Kassel. Goshka Macuga's Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not is among the dozens of works shown in the space. A huge tapestry is embellished with a banquet in a Kabul garden, with the ruins of a palace in the background and a snake in the foreground. It symbolises the Orient as a beautiful illusion in which peace is only a mirage. The second part of the work is found in Kabul itself, as Documenta stretches its borders across the world with projects scattered across Kassel, Kabul, Alexandria/Cairo and Banff.
A number of projects are presented in the areas surrounding the central exhibition space in Kassel, such as Karlsaue Park. This section takes on the problematics of landscape, with international artists interpreting the space in various ways, combining nature and artifice. Maria Loboda is among these artists, installing her piece This work is dedicated to an emperor (2012), an installation of 20 cypresses that compose a sort of moving forest that travels over the law of the park, shifting its composition and moving gradually from one side of the Orangerie to the other.
Goshka Macuga (born in 1967 in Warsaw) is based in London. She has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011), Kunsthalle Basel (2009), and Tate Britain, London (2007). She has participated in the Biennale di Venezia (2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2008), the Berlin Biennale (2008), and the Bienal de São Paulo (2006). In 2008, she was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Maria Loboda was born in 1979 in Kraków, Poland and also lives in London today. She studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main, and has had a solo exhibition at the Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany (2010). Loboda has participated in group exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2011), the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris (2010), and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2008) as well as in the Athens Biennale (2009).
The two are the newest generation of Poland's representatives at Documenta, following in the footsteps of Edward Dwurnik (1982), Paweł Althamer (1997), Zofia Kulik and Alina Szapocznikow (2007). Documenta 13 takes place in Kassel between the 9th of June - 16th of September 2012. For more information, see: d13.documenta.de
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Documenta, New York Times, Art Agenda