The resignation by eminent Indian poet, curator, and art theorist Ranjit Hoskote and the rest of the members of the Finding Committee of dOCUMENTA16 can be read as an act of dissensus
“Arise and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel, for those who sought the young child’s life are dead,” these are the lines of an angel, after the death of Herod (Matthew 2:20). Herod was the King who ordered the ‘massacre of the innocents.’ There are numerous Renaissance paintings that depict the ‘massacre of the innocents’ from Florentines like Ghirlandaio to Venetians like Tintoretto. The art world of the Renaissance period sensitively depicted the massacre of children that the king of Israel had ordered.
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A settler-colonial apartheid state that has invaded a holy land has been killing children. They have been bombing maternity hospitals. He is a latter-day Herod of the twenty-first century. The settler-colonial apartheid state has nabbed the Western world at knife-point and has threatened everyone from speaking against the massacre of children. The champions of liberal democracy in the West, are shitting in their pants, as they don’t dare to register a strong voice against the massacre of the innocents. The resignation by eminent Indian poet, curator, and art theorist Ranjit Hoskote and the rest of the members of the Finding Committee of dOCUMENTA16 can be read as an act of dissensus against that heartlessness, amidst silencing of people’s protests by the West. In a highly evocative resignation letter published in e-flux, Ranjit Hoskote wrote, “I cannot look away from this humanitarian catastrophe, its cost exacted in the lives of innocent men, women, and children.” Ranjit Hoskote felt that he had been subjected to the proceedings of a Kangaroo court. Earlier, the authorities of the quinquennial, subjected other cultural practitioners from Asia to emotional harassment, such as members of ruangrupa from Jakarta, and Emily Jacir and Jumana Manna, for expressing their opinions, on the settler-colonial apartheid state.
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Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas was invited to take part in dOCUMENTA13 and the invitation for him was to sit in a restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel, and write, as a living art installation. Vila-Matas gives an account of his inspiring experiences of dOCUMENTA13 in an entertaining book called The Illogic of Kassel which can be called a novel, a memoir, or a creative non-fiction. It can also be read as a cross-disciplinary project, as an eminent literary figure shares his encounter with global contemporary art, as a rendezvous between high literature and post-conceptual art. Vilas-Matas describes his experience of many artworks, such as the sound elements of bombing noise in an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that reminded him of the bombing raids that the city of Kassel had suffered during the Second World War.
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The curator of dOCUMENTA13, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev had installed a collection of objects titled The Brain that included Eva Hitler’s perfume bottle. It reminded Vila-Matas of the home video footage that Eva Hitler had shot of Berghof, which was a Nazi vacation home. The novelist was also reminded of home video footage of Adolf Hitler and his staff soaking up the sun on a terrace that had a view of the Alps, and the footage of Adolf Hitler taking some children by the hand and coddling them. There is something uncanny about this Nazi home video, of these tender moments, of a latter-day Herod of the twentieth century. Imagine someone seeing a home video of the settler-colonial apartheid state’s Prime Minister(!) coddling some children! What kind of emotions will that trigger in the mind of someone living? About this kind of chilling experience, Enrique Vila-Matas writes, “First time I’d seen those images I’d been surprised by the extreme beauty of the alpine landscape and the fact that the Nazi murderers were carrying on a peaceful and ordinary bourgeois Sunday morning at that look-out.”
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(A Novel Way is a series by John Xaviers Arackal which is about reading contemporary life through books, especially novels. John Xaviers Arackal is an arts professional who is serving as a Programme Officer of the Arts Practice programme at the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore.)
