Translation, My Solutions

Strangers in the City

The second part of Documenta 14 opens this Saturday. The world art exhibition’s presentation in Kassel is considerably better thought through than in Athens.

By Nicola Kuhn

Exhaustion was written all over them/their faces  and the preparations must have been taxing: managing two world exhibitions (first in Athens and now in Kassel) but without (having) double the personnel/staff. Nevertheless, they pull through, for these labors are necessary for each venue. The opening press conference for Documenta 14 lasted over three hours at the conference center. Each of the six curators was given the floor to speak – among them the minister of higher education, research, and the arts of Hesse (the German federal state in which Kassel is located), the Greek minister of culture and sports, Kassel’s mayor, the CEO of Documenta 14, and the director of Documenta’s greatest donor, the German Federal Cultural Foundation. And they all wanted to speak at the opening of the most important exhibition for contemporary art, which occurs every five years.

Only at the end of the press marathon did Polish artistic director Adam Szymczyk take the floor. After all that had been said, he seemed only capable of uttering a thanks to his assistants, who he stated kept him alive during the preparations. And that the most important take away for visitors was the meaning/significance of unlearning.

Given the Documenta motto “Learning from Athens”, Szymczyk’s advice is a contradiction. Learning from a Greece mired in debt, of all places? But it’s typical for Documenta that its organizers would first plunge its audience into a state of confusion. It calls to mind Szymczyk’s predecessor, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who in the lead-up to Documenta 13 made an appeal for dogs and strawberries to be granted voting rights and later explained that she had meant it as an appeal for a different world view.

Chancellor Merkel, allow a vote on equal marriage rights!

Will Germany pass marriage equality this week? Martin Schulz, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party, has been placing pressure on the chancellor since her recent pivot from her party’s opposing stance. Now she just needs to take the leap.

Volker Beck has something to be happy about. The politician, who is known for his green and anti-discrimination politics and who has been fighting for years for equality for homosexuals, including in marriage matters, successfully managed to thrust the debate on marriage equality to front and center of the last days of the legislative period after years of grand coalition-induced standstill. After the Green Party, per Beck’s urging, included the demands at their party’s convention for expanding marriage rights to gays and lesbians as a condition for building a coalition, the Liberal Democrats and the Social Democrats followed suit. Head/Chairwoman of the Christian Democrats and chancellor eternal Angela Merkel suddenly found herself in the defensive, both topic- and coalition-wise.

Without one of the three parties (or even two in the event of an alliance between the Christian Democrats, Liberal Democrats, and the Greens) on her side, she won’t be able to form a government after the federal election this September. Will she want put a new coalition and her possible fourth term on the line all for the sake of this question?

Merkel has not taken a clear stance either for or against expanding marriage rights just as she has never campaigned for equality for homosexuals in tax or civil service law. Instead, she’s deferred to the federal constitutional court on these matters, which has dealt with these questions in the place of politicians and has almost completely abolished legal and fiscal discrimination of gays and lesbians – except for the granting them the right to marry (as opposed to register a civil partnership) and to adopt.

After the Greens, thanks to Volker Beck, introduced the topic into the political agenda of the election, it appears that already this week, shortly before the end of the legislative period, it could come to a vote in the Bundestag – and that marriage equality might be achieved.