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guide to documenta newartnetwork.net/documenta - A light but relentless breeze, thanks to British artist Ryan Gander, blows through the Fridericianum in Kassel, one of the world's oldest museums. Three small sculptures by Julio Gonzáles, first shown at the second Documenta show in 1959, stand it the draught. It is the wind of history, an air of uncertainty and impermanence. We're blown about.

read more - Kassel's background Germany's are unavoidable at Documenta 13, which opened on Saturday. The show fills the town, from the stop to Karlsaue park, from Kassel's museums to the theatres and cinemas, from houses to hotel ballrooms. Documenta happens every 5 years, lasts 100 days, and features 200 artists. You might be tempted to travel further: to Kabul, where an Afghan outpost of the exhibition continues; or Alexandria, Cairo and Banff, where more related events are taking place.

documenta - Tacita Dean has brought the mountains of Afghanistan to Kassel, filling a former banking hall with enormous, beautiful blackboard drawings. Some are near-empty, just turbid blackness; other people are filled up with moiling rapids and rushing rivers. You can find sunlit mountaintops, dusty avalanches, chalky wipe-outs. The six panels certainly are a type of storyboard, an evocation of the elsewhere. Dean's drawings are, I do believe, high time: geological time, the flash of a life, a passing thought. "I'll just keep on till I get it right," sings Tammy Wynette, in a snatch of song by Ceal Floyer. Over and over Wynette sings the phrase. Inside a nearby room hang still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, among a number of the vessels and objects he painted and repainted, year after year, in the dusty room in Bologna. Morandi was always doing the same, but always rendering it new. Documenta is full of such interruptions: new and ancient things, the living and the dead, mysteries and miseries.