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Alexander Farenholtz
Photo: Falk Wenzel / KSB
Sabine Schormann resigned from her position as General Director of Documenta on Saturday, and on Monday afternoon the Supervisory Board announced a successor – at least until the end of the ongoing art exhibition: »Alexander Farenholtz was unanimously appointed interim managing director by the Supervisory Board of Documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH today ordered for the Documenta," the statement said.
The commitment is therefore limited until September 30, 2022.
According to the announcement, Farenholtz had already been appointed managing director in 1989 for the realization of Documenta 9.
In 1993 he moved to the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Art as head of the ministerial office and in 1996, together with Tom Stromberg, took over management of the cultural program at the Expo 2000 world exhibition in Hanover.
Most recently, from 2002 to 2020, he was administrative director of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
Schormann resigned on Saturday after a supervisory board meeting as a consequence of the anti-Semitism scandal surrounding the Documenta in Kassel.
Even before the start of the show, which is considered the most important exhibition for contemporary art alongside the Venice Biennale, accusations of anti-Semitism against the Indonesian curatorial collective Ruangrupa had been raised.
Shortly after the opening in mid-June, a work with anti-Semitic imagery was discovered.
The work was initially imposed and later dismantled.
After a decision by the supervisory board around the chairman, Kassel's Lord Mayor Christian Geselle (SPD), and his deputy, Hessen's Minister of Art Angela Dorn (Greens), the exhibition is now to be fundamentally reformed.
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