Naomi Beckwith, the artistic director of Documenta 16, has enlarged the team steering the 2027 edition, giving Diné artist and composer Raven Chacon the role of curator-at-large and bringing in three curatorial advisers. The appointments, announced on Thursday, build on the all-female core group Beckwith named last August. The exhibition itself runs from 12 June to 19 September 2027 at venues across Kassel, Germany.

Chacon works across sound, installation and performance and became the first Indigenous artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in 2022. He took part in Documenta 14 in 2017 as a member of the collective Postcommodity. The three advisers are Osei Bonsu, a British-Ghanaian historian who serves as senior curator of international art for Africa and its diaspora at Tate Modern; Timea Junghaus, an art historian known for her work on contemporary art and critical thought among Sinti and Roma communities in Europe, who led the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin from 2017 to 2025; and Noam Segal, a curator and scholar of contemporary art and technology who is associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and chairs the LG Guggenheim Award.

Beckwith, who is also deputy director and chief curator at the Guggenheim, said she was delighted to be working with makers and scholars whose convictions match their commitment to working collaboratively. The new arrivals join the core team announced last August: Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng.

The expanded team takes shape against a difficult backdrop. Beckwith told the German publication Die Zeit last month that a small number of invited artists had declined to take part, with some feeling they would not be free in Germany to show what they wished and others objecting to Germany's position on the Gaza war. The previous edition, Documenta 15 in 2022, drew allegations of antisemitism from some politicians, after which Documenta adopted a new code of conduct. Beckwith has framed the coming exhibition around artists finding ways of living together in a world in turmoil, through improvisation, experimentation and collective learning.