Obelisk

With the Christ message I WAS A FREMIDLING AND YOU HAVEN ME, engraved in English, Arabic, Turkish and German, it is intended as a timeless monument to the global problem of migration and as an appeal to welcome the persecuted. Set up decentrally on Königsplatz in 2017, the site-specific installation embodied the basic theme of documenta 14 in an exemplary manner. When the desire arose for the work to remain, the historical symbol of domination became the subject of political and aesthetic debates about its form and statement, about the artist's attitude and about its new installation. At the beginning of 2019, the monument was assigned its final location on the axis of the Treppenstraße.

Under the motto "Learning from Athens", Adam Szymczyk is spreading the exhibition over two equal locations. The spatially and temporally expanded format is intended to give the institution new impetus in the field of tension between Kassel and the Greek capital. In a comprehensive politicisation, the double exhibition is dedicated to the events of the crisis all over the world. It sees art as a means of exploring social processes. Its main themes include displacement, migration, oppression of minorities and other social problem areas in a global context. The multi-perspective endeavour sees itself as a gesture of resistance against all kinds of claims to truth and the resulting repression. As a transdisciplinary process, documenta 14 uses diverse media and participatory event forms.