100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts): No. 016, Péter György

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are publishing a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that is comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. The series is edited by Bettina Funcke.

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In his essay, The Two Kassels: Same Time, Another Space, Péter György reflects on the apparently unconnected “two Kassels” that exist next to each other. On the one hand, the former residential city in the middle of Germany, which was mostly destroyed in World War II and which became a border city through the inner division of Germany into East and West. On the other, the documenta city, which every five years, during the time of the exhibition, becomes the destination of an international audience and pushes the actual Kassel into the background with its “machinery of representation.” Looking toward dOCUMENTA (13), György sees a paradigm shift in the curatorial concept, which will involve as one of its sites Breitenau, a former Benedict cloister near Kassel that has been used for various functions (as a camp in Nazi years and as a girls’ reformatory until the 1970s): a shift to the connection of the contemporary art world with local history.

The art historian and culture critic Péter György (*1954) is Head of the Graduate Program for Film, Media, and Cultural History at the ELTE Budapest.