KASSEL.- dOCUMENTA (13) and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) have created a Curatorial Fellowship that will offer curators and scholars from Latin America the opportunity to work on the development of dOCUMENTA (13), an exhibition that will take place in the summer of 2012 in Kassel, Germany. This fellowship is offered to young arts professionals from Latin America focused on contemporary art.

The Curatorial Fellow will have the opportunity to gain work experience participating and developing different projects and public programs for dOCUMENTA (13), by working closely with the office of the Artistic Direction and Project Management. Candidates for the Curatorial Fellowship should have an interest in working with artists in the creation of art that is activated by the participation of different groups of people and in developing a diversified and interdisciplinary program for the visitors in a wide context of art, science and research.

documenta is a periodic exhibition, which began in 1955 as an attempt to re-establish culture and the visual arts as a primary focus of society, and to reconnect Germany with the field of international art at the time, after the trauma of World War II. Since then, every five years, it has become both an exhibition of contemporary art worldwide and a moment of reflection on the relation between art and society. In this age of complexity, instability, simultaneity, collapse and recovery, the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, would like to focus on where we are, where we come from, and where we might be going through a program of activities and experiences that, together with the artworks, is experienced as moments of depth, awareness, embodiment, delight, entanglement, intensity and poetry.

Interested in broadening the perspective of the project to culture generally and its relations with the world at large at this moment in history, towards a more just and peaceful “becoming with,” dOCUMENTA (13) positions the engagement of the participating artists alongside ideas and questions faced not only by contemporary art, but by societies and cultures across the globe today. Participants from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, including physics and biology, bio-architecture and bio-agriculture, philosophy, anthropology, economic- and political theory, language- and literature studies, including fiction and poetry, contribute to a space of dOCUMENTA (13) that aims to explore how different forms of knowledge lie at the heart of the active exercise of re-imagining the world.

This partnership works to further the mission of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which is to increase understanding and awareness of Latin America’s contributions to the history or art and ideas and to support innovation, education, creativity and research in the field of Latin American Art. Through grants and partnerships, CPPC also supports the professional development of Latin American artists, curators and scholars. Recent initiatives include, among others, a partnership with Hunter College (New York) to create the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Professor of Latin American Art, and an alliance with the Bard Graduate Center (New York) to organize the Cisneros Seminar in the Material Cultures of the Ibero-American World.