On July 16, Sabine Schormann, managing director and CEO of Documenta 15, the world’s leading exhibition of contemporary art, resigned under massive political pressure. Previously, accusations of anti-Semitism against the art exhibition in Kassel had come to a head.
Accusations had already been raised before the opening of Documenta, hosted this year by the Indonesian artists’ collective Ruangrupa, which, in addition to making general criticisms of colonialism, is also critical of the Israeli government’s Palestinian policy.
The accusations of anti-Semitism reached hurricane force when the exhibition briefly featured a huge, 20-year-old banner by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, directed against the social conditions in Indonesia shaped by the Suharto dictatorship.
Among hundreds of figures and scenes on the banner, critics found two displaying anti-Semitic tropes. In a row of marching soldiers or policemen, one figure bears a pig’s face, a scarf with a Star of David and a helmet with the words “Mossad”—reference to the notorious Israeli foreign intelligence agency’s involvement in Suharto’s 1965 coup, which killed between 400,000 and 1 million, including Communists and students critical of the government.
The second figure, a man in a suit and tie with shark-like teeth, a cigar in his mouth and suggested temple curls (peyes) with an SS rune on his hat, fatally resembles Nazi caricatures of Jewish capitalists.
The curators and the artists themselves apologized several...
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