 n the eleven exhibition rooms, speeches made by the artists are playing out on small TV sets. Many low and deep voices and other sounds are rising here and subsiding there, and the screeching film-rolling sounds of the out-dated film projector are occasionally heard.
These images and sounds are accompanied by quite a lot of paper in each of the exhibition rooms, where the posters for each exhibition are stuck on the walls. Words lie in glass cases, bearing old folds. The papers carry reports and manuscripts about each exhibition by the media, curators and artists. Coming from the past half century, they once again capture the attention of times for the sake of retrospection.
Visual Documents from Europe
 hile viewing the changes of contemporary art in the last fifty years, we also see meaningful installation works by artists who once won prizes at the exhibition or by the younger generations of artists, whose works are set in each of the exhibition rooms, seeming to have dialogues with the last fifty years. This is the very “50 Jahrs/Years Documenta, Archive in Motion” that is now exhibited in Zendai Museum of Modern Art.
From the post World War II era to this age of globalization, Germany has held 11 Kassel Documents Exhibitions, faithfully recording the changes of contemporary European art in the tide waves of times. As a testing ground for avant-garde art, Kassel Documents Exhibition does not belong only to Germany, it has also turned into a key landmark in the international contemporary art scenes, focusing attention of western cultural circles and mirroring the artistic images of western societies. Moving from Germany to Shanghai, this most important visual history records in international contemporary art scenes has displayed the style and material changes and intellectual explorations of contemporary European art in the last half century, offering a precious chance to Chinese artists for a better understanding of western contemporary art.
In preparation for this heavyweight retrospective of contemporary art, Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art has made renovations and divided its exhibition space into 11 rooms, each of which houses a certain exhibition’s relevant materials and the installation works created for it by artists.
Themes of Times in the Retrospective
 ifty years of storing words and visual images have carried a sense of vicissitude and heaviness, and a review of them is full of self-introspections. Wandering in each of the rooms and viewing the theme of each exhibition, we get a strong sense of the rapid changes and profound humanism of the show. With a mission like that of a mirror, Kassel Documents Exhibition has reflected the passion, confusion, militancy, doubts and cycles of the times.
Following the clue of time, we can see clearly that: in the 1950s with the first and second exhibitions, contemporary art still bore the traces of futurism, and abstract expressionism of the early twentieth century. With the third and fourth exhibitions, it was in the 1960s when American art was rising and American styles featured most prominently in the exhibitions, with more diversified contemporary art representation materials that involved all areas in creating the city space.
With the fifth and sixth exhibitions in the 1970s, when the force of mass media came to the fore, contemporary artists experienced the psychological change from “question the truth” to a “mass media art,” adopting quickly the mass media as the most experimental representation forms, and representation materials like video and experimental film all emerged in force.
By the 1980s in the seventh and eighth exhibitions, the theme suddenly changed to “liberating art from the shackles and radical changes,” and contemporary art soon got concerned with public social and political spaces, questioning the “identity of contemporary art in the fight between individual freedom and social politics.”
Following in the 1990s and early this century were the ninth, tenth and eleventh exhibitions, the latter two of which produced for the first time a Muslim female and a black scholar in the major curators, then feminism and third world discourse ascended the stage of times, elevating the exhibitions to the height of a global platform.
The theme of every Kassel Exhibition is closely related to the political, economical and cultural circumstances of the times. The transparent and discerning contemporary art at the whirlpool of times has mirrored human’s reflections and practices in face of historical circumstances. This is where the significance of Kassel Documents Exhibition comes in. And it is significant that only when Chinese artists have interpreted and understood European art can they make profound exchanges with Europe. For contemporary people and art, the times in those words and images have turned into history, but human’s indefatigable creative spirit is inspiring their explorations to the eternal future.
Friderike Feldmann documenta1
Happy Birthday
Hedi Specker and documenta 11
Vienna New Delhi Santa Lucia Lagos
Andreas Seltzer, Heike Vogler and documenta 8
Das grohse ist im kommen
Katrin Von Maltzahn and documenta 3
Charts 64
Lathatina Meldner and documenta 4
Spirits
Sabine-Gross
Value Increase
Alexander Roob and document a10
100 Tage
Jonathan Monk and documenta 9
A frozen Moment
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