The curatorial team for Documenta 16 is expanding with the announcement of four new appointments. The new team members are the composer and installation artist Raven Chacon, who was named curator-at-large, alongside the curators and art historians Osei Bonsu, Timea Junghaus and Noam Segal, who were appointed curatorial advisers.
The next edition of the influential quinquennial contemporary art exhibition, which will take place next year (12 June-19 September) in Kassel, is led by Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Her team of four women curators—Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng—will develop the exhibition, publications and programming for the upcoming edition.
The artistic team for documenta 16: Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Xiaoyu Weng, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Naomi Beckwith
© documenta and Museum Fridericianum gGmbH / Photo: Nicolas Wefers
Chacon unveiled the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence at the US/Mexico border in 2015; in 2022, he became the first Indigenous artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Bonsu is senior curator of international art, Africa, and diaspora at Tate Modern, where he co-curated Nigerian Modernism in 2025.
Junghaus was the founding director of Gallery8 – Roma Contemporary Art Space in Budapest (2013–2017) and launched the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin in 2017. Segal serves as the LG Electronics associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and was previously the director of curatorial research in the Master’s programme for curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
According to an online statement, “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. Improvisation, experimentation, and collective learning will open new paths.”
The last edition of Documenta in 2022 sparked controversy after two antisemitic images were found in the work People’s Justice (2000), by the Indonesian artist collective, Taring Padi. The work was removed from show and, in the following days, Documenta posted a statement that was attributed to the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, who curated the exhibition. It read in part: “We acknowledge that this was our error.”
