This year we are once again welcoming two Goethe Fellows to the documenta archiv: Nadia Martin (Buenos Aires) and Anna Petrova (Odesa/Berlin) will be joining the team in the coming months.

Nadia Martin is an art historian and curator from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she is a member of the National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET) and works at the Tres de Febrero University and the University of Buenos Aires.

Her research project at the documenta archiv uses the example of documenta to trace contemporary intersections between art, feminism and posthumanism. Her focus is primarily on the period between 1997, when the First Cyberfeminist International took place as part of documenta 10, and documenta 15 (2022), during which the Argentinian collective La Intermundial Holobiente thematised the relationship between human and non-human actors within the project "The Book of the Ten Thousand Things". In this way, the historical development from cyberfeminism and its reflection on the human-machine relationship to ecofeminism, which focuses on the interdependencies between species beyond the human imagination, will be illuminated.

Anna Petrova is an art historian and curator. She has lived and worked in Berlin since the beginning of the invasion in her home country of Ukraine. In her curatorial practice, she reflects on current issues such as migration, socio-cultural barriers, integration and intercultural communication.

As part of the Goethe-Institut's six-month scholarship program, she is researching the presence of Eastern European artists at documenta in Kassel, with a particular focus on artists from Ukraine – both in the historical context of the Soviet Union and the independent Ukraine. According to her research approach, documenta, as a litmus test for the contemporary art world, can contribute to creating a “biography” of relations between two parts of Europe that seem so close and yet so far apart. The study of Ukraine's presence at documenta is also productive in terms of the country's ongoing EU integration: Anna sees a retrospective understanding of Ukraine's role in the field of European art as a precondition for the prospective development of an effective action plan for Ukraine's integration into the European cultural sphere.

Welcome to Kassel!