Naomi Beckwith Adds Four to Documenta 16’s Curatorial Team, Including Artist Raven Chacon

Documenta 16 artistic director Naomi Beckwith announced Thursday an expansion of her curatorial team. Raven Chacon will serve as curator-at-large, while Osei Bonsu, Timea Junghaus, and Noam Segal will be curatorial advisers.

Chacon is a Diné artist, composer, and musician who was the first Indigenous artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, doing so in 2022. He is no stranger to Documenta; as a member of the collective Postcommodity, he showed at Documenta 14 in 2017.

Bonsu is a British Ghanaian art historian who is currently senior curator of international art for Africa and its diaspora at Tate Modern.

Junghaus is an art historian and curator who is a “leading figure in the field of contemporary art and critical thinking among the Sinti and Roma in Europe,” per a release. She was the founding executive director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin from 2017 to 2025 and curated the first-ever Roma Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale.

Segal is a curator and scholar focusing on the intersection of contemporary art and technology. She is currently associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she chairs the LG Guggenheim Award.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled to work with these brilliant makers and scholars whose convictions are as strong as their commitment to collaborative practice,” said Beckwith, who is also deputy director and chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum.

Last August, Beckwith announced an all-female core curatorial team consisting of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng.

Documenta 16 will run from June 12–September 19, 2027, at various venues across Kassel, Germany. “The exhibition and programs,” a release reads, “will honor 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.”

Last month, Beckwith told the German publication Die Zeit that “a few” artists who had been invited to participate in Documenta 16 had declined to do so. When asked to clarify why, Beckwith said, “Some have the impression that they are not free in Germany to show what they want to show. Others criticize the stance that Germany has taken on the Gaza war.”

The previous edition of the quinquennial, Documenta 15 in 2022, faced controversy with some politicians alleging claims of antisemitism at the exhibition and some of the participating artists. In the wake of that edition, Documenta adopted a new code of conduct that explicitly defined antisemitism, including that criticism of Israel is ”a racist endeavor.”