Naomi Beckwith, the artistic director of Documenta 16 and deputy director and chief curator of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, says some artists invited to participate in the next edition of the major German contemporary art exhibition have declined, citing Germany’s position on the war in Gaza and concerns about the climate for artistic expression.

Beckwith discussed the refusals in a recent interview with the German weekly Die Zeit, according to reporting published by ARTnews and German arts publication Monopol. She characterized the number as limited rather than suggesting a broad withdrawal, and the reports did not identify the artists involved.

According to the accounts of the interview, Beckwith said some artists who turned down invitations believed they might not be free in Germany to exhibit what they wanted, while others objected to the German government’s position on the Gaza war. She did not present those views as her own assessment of German law or cultural policy, but as explanations given by artists who had declined to take part.

The disclosure places a new complication in front of Documenta 16 as Beckwith and her team assemble the 2027 exhibition. Documenta is held every five years in Kassel and has long been one of the most closely watched recurring events in contemporary art, giving curators unusual latitude to bring together artists, research projects, performances and public programs from around the world.

Documenta 16 is scheduled for June 12 through Sept. 19, 2027. Beckwith was appointed artistic director in December 2024 after an international selection process. Documenta later announced that her core artistic team would include Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng.

The team has unusually strong connections to the United States. Acevedo-Yates has held curatorial roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum. Crawford is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weng has previously worked at the Guggenheim in New York, while Beckwith herself built a significant part of her career at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago before joining the Guggenheim.

Those ties make the debate surrounding Documenta 16 especially relevant to American museums, curators and artists. U.S. cultural institutions have faced their own disputes over exhibitions, public statements, donor pressure and programming related to Israel and Gaza. Beckwith’s comments demonstrate how similar tensions can affect the practical work of organizing an international exhibition, including whether invited artists are willing to participate at all.

The political sensitivities are particularly acute for Documenta because of the aftermath of Documenta 15 in 2022. That edition, organized by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, became engulfed in controversy after the large Taring Padi work “People’s Justice” was found to contain antisemitic imagery. The work was initially covered and then removed. Other works and programming at the exhibition subsequently faced scrutiny and accusations of antisemitism, leading to months of debate in Germany and internationally.

The controversy produced institutional consequences. Documenta’s then-director general, Sabine Schormann, left her position during the 2022 exhibition. An expert review commissioned afterward concluded that some material shown at Documenta 15 raised serious antisemitism concerns. Disagreements over how the institution should respond continued into preparations for the next edition.

In 2023, members of the committee tasked with selecting the artistic director for Documenta 16 resigned amid renewed controversy over antisemitism, Israel and the conditions for open cultural debate in Germany. A new selection process was later established, leading to Beckwith’s appointment the following year.

Documenta has since adopted a code of conduct intended to set standards for the organization’s administrative operations while addressing antisemitism, racism and other forms of discrimination. The official policy also explicitly states that the artistic director and artistic curatorial team are not subject to that code and that artistic freedom applies to their curatorial work. The institution says its activities are grounded in Germany’s constitutional protections and in respect for human dignity.

That distinction is important as Beckwith builds the 2027 program. The concerns she described are not allegations that Documenta itself has prohibited particular works. Rather, they reflect the perceptions of individual artists deciding whether to accept invitations to show in Germany, according to the published accounts of her interview.

Beckwith has generally framed her approach in terms of reopening dialogue rather than resolving international political disputes through a single curatorial position. In the interviews, she emphasized the difficulty of moving beyond hardened camps and restoring conversation. That approach is consistent with earlier Documenta statements about her curatorial work, which have highlighted engagement with social and cultural questions alongside respect for artists and audiences.

The full scope and theme of Documenta 16 have not yet been disclosed, and the participating artist list remains under development. That means the impact of the reported refusals cannot yet be measured against the eventual size or geographic breadth of the exhibition. There is also no public evidence at this stage that the declined invitations have caused a structural change to the project.

Still, the episode underscores the international pressures surrounding large cultural institutions as debates over Gaza continue to intersect with questions about antisemitism, Palestinian expression, protest and freedom of art. In Germany, those debates carry particular weight because of the country’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and the central place that responsibility occupies in public policy and cultural institutions.

For Beckwith, the challenge is both institutional and curatorial: assembling a globally credible exhibition while operating within an environment in which artists, governments, museums and audiences may approach the same political questions from sharply different positions. Documenta 16 remains more than half a year away, but the first disclosed refusals show that those tensions are already influencing who is willing to enter the exhibition’s public arena.