Symposium: Critical Fabulations of documenta
Date: Thursday, July 9, 2026 – Friday, July 10, 2026
Venue: Fridericianum, Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel
Opening: July 9, 6 pm, Keynote by Nikita Dhawan
Free admission, registration required: standop@documenta-institut.de
The symposium will be held in English.
The symposium Critical Fabulations of documenta is about the gaps, omissions, and suppressed histories in the narratives surrounding documenta. Rather than treating these absences as deficits, it understands them as productive starting points for rethinking its history. At its core are those voices, images, and narratives that have been marginalised, overlooked, or never fully made visible in the official histories of the exhibition. Instead of seeking a linear or complete account of documenta, the symposium asks how we can work with ruptures, contradictions, and gaps. What kinds of knowledge, storytelling, and curatorial practices can emerge from them?
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, the symposium brings together art historical research, archival practice, curatorial work and storytelling. Hartman suggests that the gaps in historical tradition be taken as a creative starting point, countering the silence of the archive with a critical fabulation. Critical fabulation offers a way to question dominant narratives and to experiment with alternative forms of historiography and curatorial practice. The aim is not to close gaps definitively or to produce counter-histories as complete corrections. Instead, it focuses on the conditions under which history is told, remembered and made visible.
The symposium will address geopolitical tensions, institutional narratives, and the mechanisms of global (in-)visibility that have shaped the history of documenta. It considers questions of absence and non-participation, overlooked political contexts, unrealised exhibitions, and alternative historical possibilities. At the same time, it explores how museums, archives, and exhibition institutions themselves can become sites of speculative and fictional practice: spaces in which the past is not only reconstructed but also reimagined in the present. Following Saidiya Hartman, the symposium seeks to not only imagine what was, but also what could have been.
Speaker:
Charlotte Bank, Matteo Bertelé, Nikita Dhawan, Andreja Hribernik, Andrea Linnenkohl, Fabienne Liptay, Nadia von Maltzahn, Matthias Mühling, Dorota Sajewska, Nora Sternfeld
The symposium is organised by Prof. Dr. Liliana Gómez and Luisa Standop.
