Artful balance
In speaking at Harvard about “dOCUMENTA (13),” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the exhibit’s artistic director and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, found great meaning in a piece of art “the size of an iPod.” The 2012 show was based in Germany with installations in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Canada that attracted scores of visitors. One installation featured several small Bactrian princess statues originating from the northern part of what is now Afghanistan and dating to 2000 B.C. Curators know of only 80 such statues in the world. Each princess is unique. The composite figurines are made up of separately carved stones. The individual sections, which together give each princess form, are not bound by glue or secured by any other mechanism. Balance is the crucial factor. History and equilibrium were also fundamental to the theme of the larger exhibit, Christov-Bakargiev said. Those concerns helped address the question of connectivity and separation,...