In her dissertation, Beatrice Barrois deals with the context of ethnographic collections and the question of how the category of (non)knowledge can be aesthetically experienced in the space of the exhibition. Based on this work she describes the artistic experiment as a possibility for new (dis)orders of knowledge. Her research focuses on methods of scholarly and artistic research and their relevance in social contexts — further information

Martin Schmidl has been rector of the Kunsthochschule Kassel since the end of 2021. He founded the research group Floorplan at the Department of Art History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, which is dedicated to the themes of the exhibition and the museum in cultural anthropology and the visual arts. He has curated project spaces for art, developed the design concept of the Sculpture Projects Münster, and has published texts on the staging and presentation of exhibitions — further information

Nanne Buurman researches, teaches, and publishes on the political, economic, and epistemological implications of curatorial practices as well as on the past and present of the documenta. She is co-founder of the internet platform documenta studien. In 2021 she curated the exhibition “wir alle sind gespenster/haunting infrastructures. Versuchsanordnungen zu NS-Kontinuitäten” in the continuities research group, which she has co-directed along with Alexis Joachimides since 2020 — further information

The focal point of Cecilia Vallejos’s work is the conceptual understanding of artistic production. With a background in theater studies and cultural analysis, she examines the methods and conceptual frameworks of established art forms such as the collaboration of artists with marginalized social groups or minorities. It is central to her interdisciplinary approach to observe criteria that determine the production and circulation of artworks, both in institutional and non-institutional contexts — further information

With her dissertation “Konstruierte Räume – Das Neue Ausstellen und seine Fotografien” (2018) Ute Famulla expounds on the efforts of the Neues Bauen movement to develop a democratic type of exhibition. Her research interests include not only the development of the medium of the exhibition, but also and especially how this is represented in print media and in particular in photography — further information

Kai-Uwe Hemken’s research and teaching focuses on the art of the classical avant-garde, on contemporary art, and on the theory and practice of curating. Furthermore, he often still curates at German and international museums. As part of projects and conferences such as “Kritische Szenografie. Die Kunstausstellung im 21. Jahrhundert” (VW Foundation) he regularly contributes to investigating curating in the past and present — further information

One of Alexis Joachimides’s research topics focuses significantly on the history of museum exhibition practice and the formative phase of the institutional dispositif from the 18th century until the post-war period. Using the example of the art museum, he examines the interaction between non-verbal communication and exhibition presentation and its explicit program, or between the intention and reception of exhibition displays in the discursive context of their time of origin — further information

Carolin Oetterer writes her dissertation on “Museumsarchitektur. Symbiose von Kunst und Architektur. Die Bauaufgabe des Kunstmuseums in der Gegenwart.” Based on her many years of examining international modern and contemporary museum architecture and a comparison of the architects Volker Staab, Renzo Piano, and Frank O. Gehry, she proposes an understanding of the task of constructing museums in our time that includes museum exhibition design — further information

Susanne Ritzmann is a design researcher and SDG professor at the Kassel Institute for Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on rituals of disappearance, the phenomenon of waste in art, design and biology, and the generation of knowledge through design practices. She empirically investigated the typologies of public stagings of waste and bulky waste in her dissertation "Wegwerfen | Entwerfen" (2017). Furthermore, she works on questions of sustainability of exhibitions and in the field of tension between valuable (art) and worthless (garbage). – further information

Before assuming her professorship, Martina Sitt spent around twenty years working at various museums on numerous exhibition both in Germany and internationally (Rome, Salzburg, Trento, New York, Haarlem, etc.). In dual projects since then, she combines the theory and practice of exhibitions in her research and teaching. A central part of this work is also cooperating with other departments such as German Studies or Theology in order to add a reflexive element to each exhibition — further information

Dierk Schmidt practices a contextual notion of painting that places great emphasis on research into the historical and in particular into the “factual” space. For instance, one recent series of his paintings, “Broken Windows 6.3,” uses the example of the museum vitrine to treat the axes of gaze and discourse in (post)colonial argumentation, as well as their power of appropriation and formulas of conflicting claims of possession with regard to objects in ethnological collections — further information

Johanna Wurz writes a dissertation in the area of historical exhibition research, with a special focus on museum history, museum theory, and exhibition practice in the 1960s and ‘70s. Starting from an analysis of publications about the ‘museum crisis’ of the time and progressive approaches in exhibition design, her doctoral thesis “Die Kunstausstellung als kritische Zukunftswerkstatt?” attempts to work out a typology of the art museum for the period in question — further information

In his teaching and research, Uwe Altrock deals with the changed forms of the performative use of space such as temporal usages or interventions and their significance in the framework of planning participation and empowerment. Above all he examines the changes in the self-conception of planning and the possibilities to increase co-productive approaches to space production — further information

Harun Faizi uses his long-term interest in 3D simulations to integrate methods of digitally experiencing architecture between the weightlessness, the continuous zooming in, and the immersive quality of three-dimensional models into his teaching and research. Research linked to the project “Virtual Reality in Teaching Architecture,” also as part of his dissertation, is currently in preparation — further information

Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs is an architect. Starting from the performative potential of architecture, the interplay of space, atmosphere, context, and users, she deliberately conceives programmatic and spatial boundaries in her buildings and concepts as permeable. As part of her teaching and researching, for instance, she examines the performative potentials of exhibiting and presenting contents in virtual space — further information or https://www.tne.space

Gabu Heindl is Professor and Head of the Department of Building Economy and Project Development | “Architecture City Economics” at the University of Kassel since Fall 2022. Her office GABU Heindl Architektur focuses on public space, public buildings, affordable housing as well as collaborations in the fields of history politics, exhibition architecture and independent critical artistic practice. Heindl has realized numerous exhibition designs, including at the Jewish Museum Vienna, FMH Women's Museum Hittisau, the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna City Library and the House of Austrian History — further information

Samuel Korn’s research focus lies at the intersection of exhibition studies and the history and theory of architecture. He examines exhibiting outside of designated presentation spaces and the relationships that this creates between exhibitions, the build environment, and society. In addition he is interested in architectural exhibitions that conceive of the format as a tool of architectural reflection beyond its potential to simply showcase architectural projects — further information

Philipp Oswalt is an architect, curator, and journalist. As part of his activist practice he often intervenes in current social debates and contemporary discourses with exhibitions, structural installations, and occasionally also performatively. One focal point of his work is in the critical examination of cultural legacy, commemorative culture, and German images of history, whether in reconstruction architecture, National Socialist Memorials, or artifacts of classical and post-war modernity — further information

Linda Schiel’s research focus in the area of the history of ideas, institutions, and architecture in museums and exhibitions is reflected in her dissertation project, which examines the convergence of museum and church buildings since the 1980s — further information

The thematic focal points in Alexander Stumm’s research are extractivism, relations of production, and postcolonial theory of architecture in the Anthropocene. Furthermore, he uses historical perspectives to examine approaches to ecological architecture: circular building/continued building of existing structures, building with natural construction materials, energy efficient building, post-anthropocentric building — further information

Felix Vogel works on the history and theory of exhibitions, in conceptual and contemporary art as well as art as a whole. He is particularly interested in aspects that often appear to be incidental, but are significantly involved in how art is made to appear. This concerns the infrastructures of exhibitions (from displays to logistics and art handling to contracts) and the “curatorial discourse” about making exhibitions — further information

In her research project Claire Zimmermann focuses on artistic positions and exhibitions that take an interest in the interactive conditions of technological change and capitalist structures. She examines how their aesthetic dimensions can be theorized and critiqued on the basis of their history, finally to pose the question of what the task of contemporary art might end up being in this interplay — further information

Charlotte Bank is a culture and art historian and an independent curator. She received her doctorate from the University of Geneva in 2017 with a dissertation on the contemporary art scene in Syria. In her research and curatorial work she deals with the modern and contemporary art of the MENASA region (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) and its representation within the global art world — further information

Luisa E. Bauer has been a research associate in the Department of Art and Society at the University of Kassel and the documenta Institute since October 2023. She studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Mainz and Universidad de Granada in Spain (B.A.) and Media Culture and Art Theories at the University of Art and Design Linz (M.A.) in Austria. After a research stay in Peru in 2022, she completed her studies in 2023 with a thesis on the museum history of Germany and Peru titled "Museos de la Memoria: On the promotion of museums of memory culture by German institutions in Peru" — further information

Photo: Gleisdreieck Collective

Tamara Bodden is doing her doctorate in German linguistics with Prof. Dr. Andreas Gardt on the “Discourse about the Public Financing of the Cultural Industry through the Example of documenta 14.” This corpus-linguistic work treats the ‘finance scandal’ of the Kassel exhibition as it was presented in the media and discusses the agonal conjunction of the domains of economy and art, documented through qualities of language — further information

Mateo Chacón Pino does research on the epistemological challenges to art history prompted by the convergence of multiple temporalities of natural and human history in the Anthropocene. This project is also a quest for the aesthetic forms of political consciousness about the dimensions of planetary time and their mediation — further information

Andreas Gardt works on the theory and practice of text and discourse analysis. In his art-related research at his department, the communicative processes in and around the documenta are considered, the emergence and intellectual shaping of the exhibition in a complex discourse. The linguistic supporting research on the documenta began with documenta 12 and will also include the current documenta fifteen — further information

Liliana Gómez does interdisciplinary research on the media history and theory of the literature and art of modernity and the present as well as on exhibitions as forms of social practice. She traces the interrelations between the visual arts, archives, and their institutional interdependencies, discourses, and narratives of human rights. Since 2017 she has been director of the SNSF research project “Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South” — further information

Hannah Katalin Grimmer is a cultural scholar and curator with a focus on memory studies and contemporary art from Latin America. She is pursuing a doctoral project on the role of art in the context of social movements through the example of Chile — further information

Stefanie Kreuzer works at the intersections of literature, film, and visual art. She is director of the Kassel Film and Media Archive as well as organizer of the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship and initiator of the accompanying film series in cooperation with the director Thomas Henke. Since 2007 she has organized continuous teaching events on trans/pluri/intermediality and narratives in the arts with reference to each current documenta — further information

Paul Reszke teaches and researches from a linguistic perspective about communicative patterns in the social domains of art, in particular using the example of the documenta and its aspiration to involve a wider public. The research objects can be both of a historical nature (for instance, the debate about Beuys’s 7000 oak trees in 1982) as well as on the contemporary communication at the documenta fifteen — further information

Christine Riess is doing her doctorate in German linguistics with Prof. Dr. Andreas Gardt on art communication. Using the working title “KunstSprech – Linguistic Examinations of the Accusation of Incomprehensibility in Art Texts” she analyzes art critics who have been accused of not being understandable (or not easily). She works on the linguistic patterns that underlie the texts — further information

As a professor for macrosociology at the University of Kassel, Heinz Bude researches influential figures of the art world of the 20th century (Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Peter Ludwig, Werner Haftmann) as well as art as a form of “living together.” He serves on the board of directors at TRACES and is the founding director of the documenta Institut. His duties at the institute include shaping and concretizing the content-related programming as well as establishing the internal and external organizational structures — further information

Hubertus Büschel is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Kassel since April 2019. He conducts historical-anthropological research combining micro- and global history on colonialism, post-colonialism and the history of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis in Africa — further information

As a research associate at the department of macrosociology of Prof. Dr. Heinz Bude, Michael Flörchinger was researching and teaching about the relationship between the City of Kassel and the documenta until autumn 2021. He continues working on this topic in his dissertation project at the University of Kassel. In October 202 he began working at the documenta Institut, where one of his task is to coordinate the cooperation between the institute and TRACES — further information

Andreas Niegl examines artistic practices beyond the context of classical exhibitions, as they take place both in public space and in the digital realm. In his research he sees these in contrast to an art historical understanding of exhibitability and the immanence of the work. A particular focus is artistic projects that work with blockchain technologies and decentralized autonomous systems — further information

Mi You researches the relationship between art and economy. In addition she is internationally active as a curator. Among other things she has curated exhibitions on the topic of the Silk Road as figuration of old and new networks and technologies in South Korea, Mongolia, and Vladivostok. Along with Binna Choi she has directed the research and curation project “Unmapping Eurasia” since 2018. In addition she is one of the curators of the Shanghai Biennale 13 (2020/21) — further information

The documenta archiv is dedicated to archiving, documenting, and promoting scholarship on text and image sources about modern and contemporary art. One of its main focal areas is the documenta exhibitions, which have been taking place since 1955. Alongside records and documents from the documenta, the holdings include extensive press collections, visual and audiovisual media, a unique art library, and relevant estates and bequests — further information