In the midst of documenta 12's dense entanglement of narratives, themes and formal displays interrogating different art histories, the recuperation of feminism and its critical discourses proved one of the highlights. Works such as Sanja Ivekovic's seminal Triangle (1979), which explores the official politics of power and gender in the public sphere in Yugoslavia in the late 1970s, Eleanor Antin's Angel of Mercy (1977/81), a tragicomic performance and installation featuring Eleanor/Florence Nightingale as a feminist heroine during the Crimean War, or the compelling new film essay by Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea (2007), resulted in a robust feminist narrative that recurred throughout the exhibition in a variety of spaces and sites. Lili Dujourie's spare collages were an exciting discovery for me: simple snippets of paper torn from magazines and sparsely pasted into a large sheet of paper to form pieces of female figures, fragmented and even shattered as a cohesive image and yet rather coolly composed on the white plane. Jo Spence became an important presence in the Aue-Pavillon - her collaborations W ith Terry Dennett in the photographic series Remodeling Photo History (1982) dealt interestingly with the female body and its codification in the photographic landscape, and offered a deep contrast to the another piece by them, The Picture of Health (1982-86), which lost all critical distance in an earnest attempt to recount the ravages of cancer on the artist's body.

From a curatorial perspective, mixing contemporary work of certain 'classical' artists such as Ivekovic, Rosler, Rainer or Mary Kelly alongside their familiar, older pieces, was smart, as it avoided historising 'feminist art' and offering a simplistic reading of its relevance today. I would go so far as to