Artistic director Naomi Beckwith has expanded the Documenta 16 curatorial team ahead of the Kassel exhibition, which runs from 12 June to 19 September 2027.
Documenta 16 artistic director Naomi Beckwith announced on Thursday an expansion of her curatorial team for the next edition of the Kassel exhibition. The Diné artist, composer and musician Raven Chacon will serve as curator-at-large, while Osei Bonsu, Timea Junghaus and Noam Segal join as curatorial advisers. Chacon, who was the first Indigenous artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in 2022, previously took part in Documenta 14 in 2017 as a member of the collective Postcommodity.
The three advisers bring distinct backgrounds. Bonsu is a British Ghanaian art historian and senior curator of international art for Africa and its diaspora at Tate Modern. Junghaus is an art historian and curator described in the announcement as a leading figure in contemporary art and critical thinking among the Sinti and Roma in Europe; she was founding executive director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin from 2017 to 2025 and curated the first Roma Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale. Segal, a curator and scholar focused on contemporary art and technology, is associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They join a core team of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng, announced last August.
Documenta 16 will run from 12 June to 19 September 2027 at venues across Kassel, Germany. According to the organisers' release, the exhibition and its programmes will honour artists as they navigate a world in turmoil, with improvisation, experimentation and collective learning opening new paths. Beckwith, who is also deputy director and chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum, said she was thrilled to work with makers and scholars whose convictions are as strong as their commitment to collaborative practice. Last month she told the German publication Die Zeit that a few invited artists had declined to take part, citing, in her account, a sense of limited freedom in Germany and criticism of Germany's stance on the Gaza war.
