Nanne Buurman – Hegemonien des Heilens, or: documenta as a Haunted House

As part of the series Vergiftete Verhältnisse - Gespräche zur Gegenwartskunst, Nanne Buurmann will be talking about the hegemonies of healing at the research station on Lutherplatz on September 20 at 6 pm.

In their first statement after being nominated as artistic directors of documenta 15 in 2019, ruangrupa announced that “if documenta was launched in 1955 to heal war wounds, why shouldn’t we focus on today’s injuries, especially the ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures”, thereby invoking the idea of the exhibition as a nurse tending to the wounds inflicted by the respective dominant system. With a focus on the etymological links between curating and curing, the notion of healing has become even more pervasive in artistic and curatorial discourse since the pandemic. Starting from a heuristic model of exhibitions as households with specific gendered divisions of labour and distributions of power, I would like to complicate the notion of healing by calling attention to its ambivalent histories within and beyond documenta. By looking at the socially re/productive dimensions of curating, the presentation aims to undo all too comfortable understandings of curating/care as purely good things also shedding light on the dark side of the cura and its governmentalities. The presentation thus deals with documenta as a haunted house – haunted, as it is, by the undead spirits of the past that don’t just live on between the pages of history books and behind the white walls of exhibitions but also inhabit our bodies and souls, thus affecting cultural infrastructures more broadly.

Nanne Buurman has been a research assistant for documenta and exhibition studies in the Department of Art Studies at the Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2018. After studying art and cultural studies in Leipzig, she was a doctoral fellow of the German Research Foundation in the international research training group InterArt at the Free University of Berlin, a visiting scholar at Goldsmiths College in London and a lecturer at universities and art academies in Leipzig, Hildesheim, Bremen and Frankfurt am Main. Buurman researches and publishes on curatorial practices, gender, labour and globalization in the field of contemporary art as well as the history and present of documenta. Since 2020, together with Alexis Joachimides, she has led the dis_continuities research group on artistic, scientific and curatorial research into NS continuities at documenta. She is co-editor of the volumes documenta. Curating the History of the Present (2017 with Dorothee Richter) and Situating Global Art. Temporalities - Topologies - Trajectories (2018 with Sarah Dornhof, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz) as well as the web platform documenta studien, which she founded in 2018 with Nora Sternfeld, Carina Herring and Ina Wudtke. Her most recent publication is Networks of Care. Politiken des (Er)haltens und (Ent)sorgens (2022 with Anna Schäffler and Friderike Schäfer).

The event is part of the lecture series Vergiftete Verhältnisse .

Location: Lutherplatz research station