Experiences with an exhibition

Julia Voss in conversation with Heinz Bude

As part of the series Vergiftete Verhältnisse - Gespräche zur Gegenwartskunst, Heinz Bude will be discussing her experiences with the exhibition documenta. Politics and Art at the German Historical Museum.

The exhibition documenta. Politics and Art, which ran at the Deutsches Historisches Museum from June 2021 to January 2022, focused on documenta as a contemporary historical phenomenon and explored its significance in the processes of Westernization in the Federal Republic of Germany. The exhibition attracted enormous attention through the presentation of new findings on one of the founding figures of documenta, Werner Haftmann. His involvement in National Socialism, which became known, shed new light on documenta. The Nazi continuities in post-war Germany now also came into view in the field of modern art. Julia Voss was instrumental in curating the exhibition at the DHM and dealt intensively with the founding years of documenta and the role of Werner Haftmann. For Julia Voss, the model of Werner Haftmann also stands for how documenta became a stage for the politics of remembrance. Heinz Bude talks to Julia Voss about her findings and her experiences with the exhibition as a public event.

Julia Voss is an honorary professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Art Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg. From 2007 to 2017 she was head of the art section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and from 2014 to 2017 she was also deputy head of the arts section. She taught art criticism at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the Philipps University in Marburg. Her work has been awarded prestigious prizes, including the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society and the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose from the German Academy for Language and Poetry. In 2013, she curated the exhibition “1938. Art, Artists, Politics” at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. She is a member of the “Geisteswissenschaften International” jury, the “Sachbuch-Bestenliste” of Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ZDF and Die Zeit, and the Arnold Bode Prize, among others. Her research focuses on the history of abstraction, the links between evolutionary theory and culture, restitution and provenance, the theory and history of the art market and art criticism. Until January 2020, she wrote the art column “Fragen Sie Julia Voss” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. At the end of February 2020, her book “Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen: Hilma af Klint - Leben und Werk. Biographie” was published by S. Fischer Verlag, which was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Non-Fiction Prize.