Naomi Beckwith, who was appointed last December to lead the forthcoming 16th edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, has named an all-female curatorial team to help organize the scandal-ridden quinquennial: Carla Acevedo-Yates, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Romi Crawford, and Xiaoyu Weng.

Carla Acevedo-Yates, a San Juan-born curator and scholar specializing in contemporary art of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the US, has held curatorial positions at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.  

Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a Colombian poet, editor, and translator who served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the John K. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin in 2018. 

Romi Crawford is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research centers on race and ethnicity in American visual culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of political movements and artistic practices. 

Xiaoyu Weng is a Shanghai-born curator and writer whose work often explores themes of identity, feminism, and decolonization. Aside from overseeing the Singapore-based private Tanoto Art Foundation, she was recently appointed as executive director of New York’s nonprofit alternative space Art in General. From 2015–21, she served as the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation associate curator at the Guggenheim in New York. 

Commenting on the appointments, Beckwith stated: “I am grateful to be working with this team on Documenta 16. I admire their independence of spirit and thought, characterized by a deep respect for artists and audiences alike.” She added that the team looks forward to “exploring the diverse fields of contemporary artistic practices together and engaging in dialogue with the pressing questions shaping our planet’s social and cultural landscapes and their futures.” 

The announcement comes amid ongoing controversies surrounding the event: in 2022, Documenta 15 wrestled with accusations of antisemitism over an outdoor mural by Indonesian collective Taring Padi; and even before the exhibition opened, a space reserved for the Palestinian art collective The Question of Funding was vandalized. In November 2023, the finding committee for Documenta 16 withdrew en masse following the resignation of Mumbai-based writer and curator Ranjit Hoskoté, who faced slanderous allegations of antisemitism by the German media and government for signing a 2019 protest petition that likened Zionism to Hindu nationalism.

In February of this year, Documenta once again received backlash, this time for its new code of conduct, which includes a contentious definition of antisemitism and authorizes the supervisory board to interfere with any exhibited works that violate regulations. 

Documenta 16 is scheduled to take place from June 12 to September 19, 2027, in Kassel.

Sanle Yan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.