exergue – on documenta 14

The 14th edition of documenta, the world’s most prominent contemporary art exhibition—historically based in Kassel, Germany—opened in Athens in April 2017. By that moment, Dimitris Athiridis had been following its artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team for more than two years in the run-up to the event. As Athiridis’s lens captures the crowd in front of one of the Athens venues, Szymczyk says, off-camera: “They don’t know what this exhibition… hides.”

Over the course of 14 approximately hour-long chapters, exergue – on documenta 14 takes us through the entire journey, from Szymczyk’s radical proposition—staging a double exhibition in both Kassel and Athens, for a start—to the eventual media fallout over the show’s considerable budget overrun. But first of all, it reveals the myriad ways in which artistic freedom tends to be defined and constrained by an economic and geopolitical framework that seeks to instrumentalize creative expression, and the sort of tensions that arise with the ambition to open up that frame.

Rather than providing a chronological behind-the-scenes account, Athiridis occasionally jumps back and forth in time to forge a thought-provoking, at times poetic, and utterly compelling real-life drama. His film becomes an exposition of Szymczyk’s relentless attempts to challenge and provoke the very notions that underlie our concept of an art manifestation—and in that process, documents what it means to be contemporary.