Documenta 16 expands its curatorial team with four appointments

By James Calloway

Documenta 16 will run in Kassel from 12 June to 19 September next year, with four appointments announced for a curatorial team led by Naomi Beckwith. The influential quinquennial contemporary art exhibition now combines Beckwith’s four-person core team with three curatorial advisers and one curator-at-large.

Beckwith serves as deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng form the four-woman team that will develop the exhibition, publications and programming.

What do the four appointments change?

• Raven Chacon, curator-at-large. The composer and installation artist joins the expanded structure with a title distinct from the three advisers. Chacon unveiled the two-mile-long land-art installation Repellent Fence at the US/Mexico border in 2015, and in 2022 became the first Indigenous artist awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
• Osei Bonsu, curatorial adviser. He is senior curator of international art, Africa, and diaspora at Tate Modern. He co-curated Nigerian Modernism there in 2025.
• Timea Junghaus, curatorial adviser. She was founding director of Gallery8 – Roma Contemporary Art Space in Budapest from 2013 to 2017. She launched the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin in 2017.
• Noam Segal, curatorial adviser. He serves as LG Electronics associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Previously, he directed curatorial research in the Master’s programme for curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Chacon’s appointment places an artist with a substantial record in public installation within the expanded leadership structure, although the announcement gives him no defined portfolio. Repellent Fence already demonstrates his use of distance, terrain and national division as artistic material; a two-mile work cannot separate site from scale.

Bonsu’s remit at Tate Modern centres international art, Africa and the diaspora, while Junghaus’s institutional history begins with Roma contemporary art. Segal brings museum research and graduate-level teaching into the group. Together, the three advisers extend the team’s collective expertise across artistic production, diasporic histories and curatorial scholarship.

How does the enlarged team fit Beckwith’s structure?

The announcement preserves Beckwith’s four-woman core team as the group responsible for the exhibition, publications and programming. The four new appointments sit alongside that structure: three advisers contribute curatorial and art-historical perspectives, while Chacon occupies the separate curator-at-large title.

That division should matter to artists working across institutions, disciplines and borders. It identifies both a substantial curatorial group already charged with making the edition and a wider set of perspectives brought in around it. The announcement does not specify how advisers will affect individual commissions or acquisitions, so their influence remains formally undefined.

What does the 2022 controversy demand?

The previous Documenta supplies a necessary measure for this enlarged team. After two antisemitic images were found in People’s Justice (2000), by the Indonesian artist collective Taring Padi, Documenta removed the work from the 2022 exhibition.

In the following days, Documenta posted a statement attributed to the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, which had curated the exhibition. It read in part: “We acknowledge that this was our error.”

That admission placed responsibility for curatorial oversight at the centre of the institution’s response. The new team now inherits both the public memory of that removal and the expectation of care that the statement expressed. The four appointments cannot erase the 2022 episode, but they will shape how scrutiny, consultation and accountability operate in Kassel.

Where is Documenta 16 heading?

An online statement says: “the [Documenta 16] exhibition and programmes will honour artists as they navigate a world in turmoil, developing strategies and new possibilities for living together amid planetary indeterminacy.” It adds: “Improvisation, experimentation, and collective learning will open new paths.”

The language places collective practice and improvisation at the centre of the programme, giving the expanded team a clear interpretive frame. Chacon’s installation history, Bonsu’s diasporic remit and Junghaus’s Roma arts leadership make that frame visible through the people appointed, rather than only through exhibition copy.

Before the 12 June opening, the new structure’s practical test will be whether it can convert collective learning into rigorous exhibitions and publications. Its credibility will depend just as much on carrying the lessons of People’s Justice into curatorial decisions.