KASSEL, Germany — The longtime curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has a lot on her mind, and she has managed to wedge a remarkable amount of it into Documenta 13.

As artistic director of the latest version of this always overbearing international exhibition of mostly contemporary art, which is staged every four or five years in this drab industrial city in central Germany, Ms. Christov-Bakargiev has assembled an immense, unruly organism of a show. It is alternately inspiring — almost visionary — and insufferable, innovative and predictable, meticulous and sentimentally precious. I would not have missed this seething, shape-shifting extravaganza for the world, and I’d rather not see its like again, at least not on this dwarfing, imperious, self-canceling scale.

By now, it is almost tradition for Documenta to present more art than is possible to track down, much less absorb. The current effort spreads the work of some 200 artists and artists’ collectives from some 50 countries all over Kassel, starting at the Fridericianum, the regal Neo-Classical museum that has been the show’s heart since its inception in 1955. Ardently feminist, global and multimedia in approach and including works by dead artists and selected bits of ancient art, it provides visitors with paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and, most of all, quite a number of impressive installation and performance pieces. Works involving sound or music of some kind are often especially outstanding.

Many efforts push, sometimes to a sophomoric degree, against the boundaries separating art and life while straining the limits of the exhibition format. Also on display are scientific projects by a quantum physicist and a geneticist, and an anger-management workshop, courtesy of an Australian artist, that you can sign up for. It is not clear how many more times we need to be reminded that anything can be considered art, but there you are. The larger point seems to be that Ms. Christov-Bakargiev is more interested in creativity in general than in art in particular.