Abstract

Through an illustrated tour of some of the works encountered at documenta fifteen in the summer of 2022, this essay listens to an emergent epistemology of multiple and heterogenous souths to unpack the Kantian tradition of critical distance and the creation of objects of aesthetical and commercial evaluation. Responding to a largely collective understanding of artistic processes rather than individual artworks, I suggest that the success of the event, often obscured by a smokescreen of accusations of antisemitism seeking to bolster the status quo, lay in a performative unpacking of certain structures of cultural power. Transitory certainly, but, like art itself, an important trace of other possible worlds.