[Reader-list] Re: Documenta11's New Delhi

[Okwui at aol.com]

Dear all,

I have followed with keen interest some of the postings on this site around 
Documenta11’s second platform in New Delhi. Despite the imprecision of much 
of the commentary, I wish to draw one simple conclusion, namely that critique 
in all its aspects (intellectual, practical, and otherwise) is a healthy 
thing in all matters of public debate. This therefore is the principal reason 
for this response: to correct the unfortunate perception of what in the 
ongoing discussion has passed for discourse. There is evident satisfaction 
from this end that there exists now a concrete basis to scrutinise the work 
of a cultural behemoth such as Documenta, in the full glare of public 
discourse. When I put together the program of Documenta along three years 
ago, it seemed already clear that for Documenta11 to have any meaning as a 
public event, one must do more than evoke the name of its public feature, but 
must rather move towards building a different sort of public sphere that does 
not assume apriori, the notion that it already exists either as a public 
institution or as an exhibition. If one could stop for a moment, qua Homi 
Bhabha to ask: "What is the location of culture today?" Or to frame it in 
another way: "what is the location of contemporary art as it is presently 
circumscribed within the general logic of the today's global condition?" This 
question goes further than simply rephrase an already wornout notion that 
comes with certain theological aspects of the virtues of global capitalism 
and its attendant consequences for how we experience, theorise, historicise 
culture today, but effectively engages the fundamental problem of how we must 
all think about and position ourselves around "global" exhibitions. In 
confronting this predicament as a curator, I wanted to move the exhibitionof 
Documenta11 a bit off from the logic of the mega event that has been central 
to its very identity, and instead to settle and concentrate on a series of 
smaller, more intimate public debates, that is to say to evolve the entire 
critical operation of the exhibition into a series of discursive events 
instead of one grand event. 

To do so one also needed to interrogate the parameters of artistic discourse 
upon which large scale international/global exhibitions assume their 
legitimacy. Obviously, I have more than a curatorial interest in this 
inquiry. I can therefore state that my interest is also both practical and 
intellectual. I do not merely share in the simplistic notion of certain 
belated and dunderheaded forms of institutional critique and pseudo-globalist 
moralising such as has been smuggled into this discussion by Mr. Phillip 
Poccok’s odious contribution (I shall return to that later) that takes a wild 
scatter shot approach into the dark as one way of unsettling the so-called 
global/colonial hegemony (a clearly confused conflation), rather the object 
of any serious discourse must work first to establish and declare its method. 

It is here that I must remind our readers that the platforms in New Delhi, 
like in Vienna, Berlin, St. Lucia, and Lagos are manifestations of our intent 
to establish the grounds and method of our discourse. It does so not merely 
to displace and deterritorialise Documenta’s given mass public nature in 
Kassel, but to bring to question whether it is in fact tenable under the 
prevailing conditions of globalisation to view an important venue such as 
Documenta as a closed circuit in the larger global interest or as a vessel to 
simply absorb and assimilate subaltern knowledge. Therefore, I want to place 
full emphasis on the idea that to reconstitute the debate of this event, its 
impressive record notwithstanding, we must also be willing to make tenuous 
the grounds of Documenta’s legend, namely its very impenetrability by other 
forums and spaces of knowledge production, other audiences, and other ways of 
knowing and living and producing culture within the current global juncture. 
I can even confidently insist that it is not Documenta11’s ambition to make 
an art exhibition, but instead to focus on taking the measure of the 
processes out of which culture emerges not as product, but as a complex of 
critical ideas to be worked through, translated and interpreted. If this 
means risking being a touch prolix, so be it, the better not to relapse into 
thinking of exhibitions as purely spaces where the grounds of a materialist 
notion of object relations are exhibited and consumed. This means then we 
need to ask a simple question; "what kind of public sphere is an exhibition 
such as Documenta?" I will first concede that such a public sphere brings 
with it pressing demands for what it’s content should be and who should 
contribute to it. On all counts the five constellations that represent the 
principal thrust of Documenta11’s platforms are simply an experiment where 
the result does not rest on the universal or general acceptance of each 
scenario. Instead, the five platforms provide an opportunity to conduct our 
research and work in a transparent, public manner. This means, that we also 
need to develop a more complex understanding of what an international public 
is with regards to Documenta’s averred claim that it is the "most important 
international exhibition of its kind". Given this averredness, do we take it 
as a general matter of historical accuracy that all acts of naming, claims 
for itself, a priori, the significance that is inscribed in that naming? I 
think not. 

We live in a complex and complicated world and increasingly as curators, 
intellectuals, artists, scholars, etc. we are called upon by an enlarged 
global public sphere to define and render with greater precision the ground 
upon which the agency of our individual work rests. To do so then, one must 
do more than appropriate the globalist legitimation which exhibitions like 
Documenta claim for themselves and begin to develop and constitute in Pierre 
Bourdeiu’s sense the field of a general curatorial discourse that does not 
merely instrumentalise art and append it to discourse and vice versa. This 
seems to me one central misunderstanding of our work in New Delhi. From the 
perspective of someone based in Delhi, one may try to understand and 
sympathise with the anxiety and even the resentment towards a project such as 
Documenta11’s, especially in what may be seen as its principal presumption, 
namely to bring its discourse to an India it has no historical relationship 
with. But I cannot share in the rather surprising hint of Indocentrism that 
has lurked into the interpretation of the events. My remarks here mainly 
concern two postings by Monica Narula and Mr. Phillip Pocock. 

I begin with Ms. Narula’s claim that India Habitat Center where the 
exhibition and symposium were held is "not the easiest place to enter if you 
do not have enough capital, cultural and otherwise", while this observation 
at its base may be seen as true, my contrary observation is that given the 
complex system of class and caste in India, in fact Ms. Narula’s materialist 
deployment of marxist theory in her reading of culture and capital appends to 
itself a consciousness of a wellworn stereotype which pits on the one side 
the decadent, privileged West and on the other the exploited, 
underprivileged, excluded periphery. We need a better theory to grapple with 
this dilemma asthe distinguished economist Amartya Sen reminds us in his book 
"Development as freedom." Freedom's viccissitudes alows us the critical 
agency to work through via honest debate the ways to confront the basic fact 
that there is great abuse, injustice and inequity against marginal states, 
economies, and cultures in the present global arrangement. But in the 
critique of such abuse, inequity, and injustice we need sharper, more 
principled, sophisticated and analytical methods to confront the ways 
transnational, supranational, and powerful states undermine the basic rights 
of the less powerful.

Having said that, the critique of Documenta11’s platform in Delhi on this 
ground seems to me misplaced. The fact is quite basic and clear, we worked 
very closely with Dr. Alka Pande the curator of the exhibition gallery at 
India Habitat Center to organise the symposium and exhibition. Dr. Pande was 
not only an excellent interlocutor and partner but also a careful, sensitive 
and highly informed guide through the convoluted system of patronage and 
competition that is part of the daily reality of a large cosmopolitan capital 
city like Delhi.  She worked quite hard not only to organize all our efforts 
as a co-organiser, but wanted above all to make The India Habitat Center a 
hospital place for all and sundry. It was our abiding wish that the symposium 
and exhibition reach a wide spectrum of people in the art community, the 
academic and university community and an interested general public. The 
symposium was free of charge (including lunch), no one was turned away and 
the Delhi media (television, web magazines, newspapers, magazines, radio, 
journals) covered the event vigorously. In fact, I was surprised and taken 
aback by the amount of coverage. The second point concerning Ms. Narula’s 
statement is that this is the least attended cultural event she has seen in 
India, flies in the face of the fact that hundreds of people registered for 
the conference with attendance from a diverse grouping of people which 
included students, activists, filmmakers, artists, academics, members of the 
diplomatic corps, etc. The symposium over the course of its five days 
continuously had attendance that was diverse, with some attendees coming from 
Bombay, and other cities.  As a veteran of many conferences in Africa, Latin 
America, North America, Asia, and Europe, this number on a steady basis over 
five days is remarkable and people in Delhi said as much for the public of 
symposiums in the city. I do not know therefore know which barometer Ms. 
Narula uses to measure attendance.  Besides, it was never the stated goal of 
the platforms to produce a rock concert.

My next point concerns her second posting about "the general ignorance of 
India on the part of visiting artists and scholars", what’s evidently 
saddening about this point is that again it recapitulates another assumption 
about intellectuals as knowing, worldly, and in full possession of knowledge 
of all places on this planet. A cursory reading of Amitav Ghosh's "The Iman 
and the Indian" would give us pause in this direction. God forbid that I 
should be a full master of the history of Germany as a prerequisite for my 
appointment three years ago as the artistic director of Documenta11. In the 
guise of agreeing with Shuddha’s more nuanced evocation of what he calls "the 
asymetery of ignorance" Ms. Narula forgets that such assymetery is merely a 
notation on the larger disjunction between intellectuals who work in very 
specific fields and the more general, albeit touristic, sense of knowing 
where you have traveled to. In fact, if she had cared to stay through the 
course of the conference she would have learned that many speakers made quite 
concrete and intellectually sound observations about India, namely the five 
Indian’s who presented papers in the conference: Urvashi Butalia, Dilip 
Simeon, Rustom Barucha, Shahid Amin, and Gurjot Mahli; secondly Alfredo Jaar 
spoke about his work on the Bhopal disaster, while Mahmood Mamdani’s talk 
also reflected this very question. Of the 20 presentations a number of 
speakers either spoke directly on or evoked India. Why is that seen as 
insufficient. Every intellectual exchange allows the possibility for the 
broadening of what Shuddha exhorts "transcultural intellectuals" to do namely 
to "enlarge their horizon of curiosity." Such enlargement is not merely 
reserved for visiting scholars to India. I will conclude on this point by 
merely remarking that Babri Masjid and Partition in India as two cleavages in 
contemporary India’s painful memory points to the simple fact that within the 
discourse of the platform in Delhi, India’s experience is not unique. On the 
Hollywoodness of Ghandi’s Experiments with Truth, a general sense of 
historical precision may remind our dear panelist that Ghandi’s truth is not 
an Indian truth, but a personal quest, an act of individual examination of 
consciousness and truth. I must also remind her that Ghandi’s conception of 
non-violence was formulated in South Africa and deployed to full effect in 
India, a truly transcultural philosophy if there is one.  About the 
centrality of Partition and Babri Masjid, it may be important to recall the 
commentary of a South Indian in the audience during the very last session of 
the symposium who insisted that in Kerala and in South India from where she 
comes that Partition and Babri Masjid are seen exactly as a North Indian 
problem that does not concern them. Urvashi Butalia was obviously right in 
pointing out to her that that is not the case given the ascendancy of Hindu 
Majoritarianism in India.  I wish to note also that we should do away with 
the gratuitous notions of imperial/truly local cleavage that oftentimes 
informs the discourse on difference. On this count I thought it was not only 
ungracious, but also an unnecessary cheap shot on the part of Monica in the 
caricature of the jetsetting academic from New York she painted at the end of 
her posting. Contrary to that caricature, non of the speakers are jetsetting 
academics. We should also begin to realise that there is nothing glamorous 
about traveling in cramped economy seats, deprived of sleep, and basic 
necessities and still arrive to engage and contribute in a measured and 
worthwhile manner to a professional debate. I do not believe that we need to 
stoop to the level of disparaging guests to make the real important point of 
inequality of access, the muteness of non-hegemonic voices in the all 
important questions around which a viable transcultural discourse is 
constructed.

I come presently to Mr. Pocock, on whose postings, I frankly do not want to 
expend much thought or energy. Suffice it to say that Mr. Pocock seems 
clearly avid to play the game of hubris which only the most tin-earred, 
self-appointed minders of the gates against imperialism, colonialism, or 
other such nonsense he espouses, can adopt. But what makes his ludicrous 
attempt at pompous indignation unsavoury is his sudden swerve into that 
crooked road of race baiting. Like all intolerant demagogues and bigots his 
suggestion that the invited Indian speakers are government appointees flies 
in the face of the facts and makes little sense. However, what is truly 
remarkable is the fact that members of Sarai as hosts of this forum shy away 
from the fundamental issue of challenging Mr. Pocock’s idea that the 
diasporic Indian speakers (there are in fact only two) like my colleague Dr. 
Sarat Maharaj and Prof. Mahmoud Mamdani are " foreigners of Indian origin 
with questionable roots". We have heard plenty of this sort of racist talk in 
European politics and media lately in Italy (Northern League, Forza Italia, 
National Alliance), Belgium (VlamBlok); Austria (Freedom Party), France 
(National Front), Great Britain (British National Front, Tory and remember 
Enoch Powell’s "rivers of blood" speech or Lord Tebbitt’s "Cricket Test"). In 
each of these examples, "foreigner" is the short hand for mindless 
intolerance and much violence both to civil discourse and the body. 

My question to Mr. Pocock is: what sort of Indian is good enough in your 
questionable roots test? And  by what degree should their foreignness 
determine their exclusion or inclusion in areas of discourse they otherwise 
are highly qualified to speak on? On the account of "foreigners of Indian 
origin" he may do well to read the book of one such foreigner, the 
distinguished Mahmoud Mamdani. His book "From Citizen to Refugee"  on the 
fate of Ugandan Indians after their expulusion by Idi Amin may  yet give Mr. 
Pocock a measure of what claims of foreignness may indeed accomplish.

On the part of Documenta11’s platforms, I am under no illusion that it’s very 
premise will neither be challenged nor questioned. That’s par for the course 
and we welcome every honest, fair, and informed critique. In fact we not only 
welcome such critique, it is already clearly inscribed in the very logic of 
the platforms as discursive areas of passionate intellectual, artistic, and 
civil debate.

I thank you all for your time.    

Okwui Enwezor
Artistic Director
Documenta11