KASSEL.- documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH welcomes Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Nicole Deitelhoff, Susanne Gaensheimer, Diane Lima, Christoph Menke, and Thomas Sparr as members of the newly founded Scientific Advisory Board. They have been appointed for five years by the shareholders’ meeting at the proposal of the Supervisory Board and in consultation with the Management Board.

With immediate effect, the Scientific Advisory Board will advise and support the Supervisory Board and the Management Board of documenta gGmbH on a technical and scientific level. Its members will address current social and academic discourses within the specific context of documenta gGmbH and harness these for the further development of documenta. They will promote the professional and curatorial networking of documenta gGmbH while contributing their own and other relevant international, outward-looking and pluralistic perspectives from science and research.

“Just as each individual documenta exhibition brings forth new levels of development on the basic principle of documenta, the founding of the Scientific Advisory Board represents a significant advancement in the evolution of the world art exhibition. For the future of documenta, I am delighted at the commitment shown by the renowned experts and their willingness to contribute their expertise to the concrete cooperation with the bodies of documenta gGmbH,” says Sven Schoeller, Chairman of the Supervisory Board at documenta gGmbH and Lord Mayor of the City of Kassel.

Timon Gremmels, Hessian Minister of State for Science and Research, Art and Culture, emphasizes: “With the establishment of the Scientific Advisory Board we have taken another key step towards the future viability and increased crisis resilience of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH. In so doing, we are sending out a strong signal for the further development of documenta as a global cultural event.”

Andreas Hoffmann, Managing Director of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, welcomes the Scientific Advisory Board: “I would like to thank all members for their commitment, their knowledge, and their perspectives. With their impulses, they make an important contribution to further profiling the institution as an internationally relevant platform for artistic exchange and, at the same time, to being able to react to challenges in a well-founded manner.”

Members of the Scientific Advisory Board of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH

Tania Coen-Uzzielli serves as Director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art since January 2019. Under her leadership, the museum drew over a million visitors annually and has been recognized by The Art Newspaper as one of the world’s top 100 museums for four consecutive years. Prior to her tenure at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Coen-Uzzielli held the position of Curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. There, she curated several exhibitions and led significant projects, including developing and curating the Synagogue Route installation, a celebrated feature inaugurated in 2010. In 2015, she curated the multidisciplinary exhibition A Brief History of Humankind, inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Sapiens: Brief History of Humankind which later traveled to the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. She further co-curated the exhibition In Statu Quo: Architecture of Negotiation in the Israeli Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Coen-Uzzielli holds a BA and MA in Art History and Archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nicole Deitelhoff is Professor of International Relations and Theories of Global Order at Goethe University Frankfurt. As Managing Director of the Leibniz Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), she heads the research area International Institutions. She is also the current co-spokesperson of the Frankfurt branch of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit – FGZ) and of the research initiative ConTrust: Trust in Conflict – Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty. Her research focuses on such fields as contestation and crises of institutions and norms, the foundations of political rule and its legitimization, forms of opposition and dissidence as well as democracy and cohesion. Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2022, Deitelhoff has increasingly appeared as an expert in public debates. In 2022, she chaired the Scientific Advisory Panel of documenta fifteen, consisting of Prof. Dr. Marion Ackermann, Prof. Dr. Julia Bernstein, Marina Chernivsky, Prof. Peter Jelavich, Christoph Möllers, and Facil Tesfaye.

Susanne Gaensheimer has been Director of the Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf since 2017. She has realized numerous exhibitions on international artists at K20 and K21 and renewed the collection in the spirit of polyphony. From 2009 to 2017, she was Director of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, whose branch location MMK 2 she founded. As curator of the German Pavilion at the 54th and 55th Venice Biennale, she presented Christoph Schlingensief (Golden Lion) in 2011 and Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng and Dayanita Singh in 2013. Previously, she was Director of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collection at Lenbachhaus in Munich (2002-2008) and Director of the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster (1999-2001). Susanne Gaensheimer has been an Honorary Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2016. She lends her expertise sitting on influential committees, including the jury for the Turner Prize 2013, the Selection Committee for the curators of the 7th and 8th Berlin Biennale and the Finding Committee for the curators of documenta 14. 2023 saw her launch the K21 Global Art Award, which will be presented to international artists for the third time now in 2025.

Diane Lima is a Brazilian curator, scholar, and key black feminist voice in Latin American art. She has organized and collaborated on a series of exhibitions, most recently the 35th São Paulo Biennial – choreographies of the impossible (2023), the retrospective of Paulo Nazareth at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2024), and the 3rd Frestas Triennial (2020/2021). Lima also organized Absent Dialogues at Itaú Cultural (2016/2017), a landmark interdisciplinary program that shaped Brazil’s anticolonial discourse. In 2021, she received the Ford Foundation Global Fellowship, recognizing her social justice leadership. Lima is the editor of Negros na Piscina: Arte Contemporânea, Curadoria e Educação (Blacks in the Pool: Contemporary Art, Curatorship, and Education) (2024), a retrospective of the last ten years about the debate around raciality and art. In 2024, Lima was a Guest Professor at UNAM in Mexico City and currently serves as Programming Director for the ESAP Fellowship 2025 by the A&L Berg Foundation, supporting professional development for Latinx curators in the U.S.

Christoph Menke is a German philosopher and Germanist and has been Professor of Philosophy in Frankfurt am Main since 2009. He is considered a key exponent of the contemporary Frankfurt School. Menke is a member of the Normative Orders Research Center and co-editor of the European Journal of Philosophy. He has written numerous acclaimed books on aesthetics – such as Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff der ästhetischen Anthropologie (Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology) – and political philosophy such as Kritik der Rechte (Critique of Rights) and Recht und Gewalt (Law and Violence). His most recent book Theorie der Befreiung (2022) (Theory of Liberation) was widely discussed in the press and social media beyond the sphere of philosophy. Christoph Menke was a participant in documenta 13 (2012).

Thomas Sparr is an author, literary scholar, and works as Editor-at-Large at Suhrkamp Publishing House. After studying literature and philosophy in Marburg, Hamburg, and Paris, he worked at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the city’s Leo Baeck Institute from 1986 to 1989 and subsequently at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. From 1990 to 1998, he was head of the Jewish publishing house Jüdischer Verlag and chief editor of publisher Siedler Verlag. In May 2024, together with Amir Eshel, he published Deutsche und Juden. Dokumentation of eine Debatte (On the unresolved debate on Germans and Jews). His other publications include Ich will fortleben, auch nach meinem Tod (2023), which fills a gap in the narrative about Anne Frank, Todesfuge. Biographie eines Gedichts (2020), Hotel Budapest, Berlin. Von Ungarn in Deutschland (2021), and Grünewald im Orient: Das deutsch-jüdische Jerusalem (2018) which appears in English translation under the title German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City.