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self-help guide to documenta review here - A mild but relentless breeze, thanks to British artist Ryan Gander, blows from the Fridericianum in Kassel, one of many world's oldest museums. Three small sculptures by Julio Gonzáles, first shown in the second Documenta show in 1959, stand it the draught. It's the wind of history, an aura of uncertainty and impermanence. We're blown about.

read more - Kassel's history and Germany's are unavoidable at Documenta 13, which opened on Saturday. The show fills the town, in the stop to Karlsaue park, from Kassel's museums to its theatres and cinemas, from houses to hotel ballrooms. Documenta occurs every 5 years, lasts 100 days, and has 200 artists. You may be lured to travel further: to Kabul, where an Afghan outpost from the exhibition continues; or Alexandria, Cairo and Banff, where more related events consider place.

review here - Tacita Dean has brought the mountains of Afghanistan to Kassel, filling an early banking hall with enormous, beautiful blackboard drawings. Some are near-empty, just turbid blackness; others are full of moiling rapids and rushing rivers. There are sunlit mountaintops, dusty avalanches, chalky wipe-outs. The six panels are a sort of storyboard, an evocation of the elsewhere. Dean's drawings are, I do believe, about time: geological time, the flash of a life, a passing thought. "I'll just keep on till I buy it right," sings Tammy Wynette, in the snatch of song by Ceal Floyer. Repeatedly Wynette sings the saying. In a nearby room hang still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, among some of the vessels and objects he painted and repainted, every year, in his dusty room in Bologna. Morandi was always doing the same, but always which makes it new. Documenta is stuffed with such interruptions: new and ancient things, the living as well as the dead, mysteries and miseries.