It’s a mistake to think of documenta 14’s bifurcation as complimentary exhibition strategies. Such logic would pair off Athens as the exhibition’s precursor, its amuse bouche, introducing a series of problems (or taste accentuations to continue the metaphor) that would be latter reiterated, compounded, or resolved in Kassel. Rather, as the curators have been at pains to point out, the exhibition is simultaneous; stereoscopic rather than periscopic. Such a strategy eschews the implications of a hypothesis being tested out, of the exhibition functioning as a gathering of testimony that is merely steamrolled into that clarity of expression we expect so often.
