Indonesian “mural” rocks Documenta exhibition of contemporary art in Germany

The director of the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, was forced to resign after a controversy over artwork by Indonesian artists, according to officials of the International Art Forum.

The committee supervising Documenta, one of the world’s largest contemporary art fairs, expressed its “deep dismay at the emergence of blatantly anti-Semitic slogans” at the forum’s opening in June, according to a statement.

An agreement was reached with the gallery’s director, Sabine Schuurmann, to “terminate her contract”, with the appointment of a temporary management.
The artwork that sparked the scandal is a large mural painted by a group of Indonesian artists called Taring Padi.

The mural includes a tape that the group called “People’s Justice”, showing a soldier with a pig’s head on his helmet the Star of David and the “Mossad” logo.

The painting also shows a curly-haired man with long teeth wearing a hat with the Nazi logo and smoking a cigar, reminiscent of anti-Semitic caricatures of orthodox Jews.

Soon, the work was removed from the exhibition at the request of the Israeli embassy and representatives of German Jews.

The committee supervising Documenta promised to shed full light on the issue in order to avoid other “anti-Semitic incidents” in the culture and arts circles, according to the statement.

German Culture Minister Claudia Roth supported the director’s departure and called for efforts to focus on finding out how such work reached the walls of the exhibition.

A spokeswoman told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that “the necessary lessons should be learned”.

The art exhibition opened mainly with another controversy, as a group of Palestinian artists participating in it, The Question of Funding, which is highly critical of Israel, was accused of being linked to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

BDS is a global campaign calling for an economic, cultural and scientific boycott of Israel in order to end the Israeli occupation and settlement in the Palestinian territories.

The German parliament classified the BDS movement in 2019 as “anti-Semitic” and prevented it from obtaining government funding, while the federal state provides about half of the documenta’s budget of 42 million euros.

The organizers of “Documenta” this year wanted to give more space to the artists of the “southern” countries and expand the artistic horizons of the exhibition.

The scandal is a severe blow to the fifteenth session of the exhibition, which was first organized in 1955 and is held every five years.