documenta 14

09.19.2017

documenta 14, April 8–September 17, 2017, in Athens, Kassel, and beyond, has reached more people than ever before

documenta 14 is not owned by anyone in particular. It is shared among its visitors and artists, readers and writers, as well as all those whose work made it happen.…

News

Listening to Matanzas

by Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…

Notes

Nairy Baghramian

In her short story “The Iron Table” (1943), Jane Bowles describes a couple who are discussing whether or not the woman would be happy living in the desert, where the man wants to be. They seem to be…

Artists

Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence

by Sean O’Toole

Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

Calendar

Interview with Bonita Ely

Public Education

New York

Athens

New York

Kassel

The documenta 14 Reader

The main book of documenta 14 takes the form of a Reader, evoking the various meanings associated with the term…

Publications

Romantso

Romantso translates to “novel.” It was also the title of the popular Greek magazine that featured novel-length stories in each of its issues. It first launched in 1934; when, in 1956, its price dropped…

Venues

Amrita Sher-Gil

In Self-Portrait as a Tahitian, Amrita Sher-Gil performs her corporeality as a field of citation. As one of the most striking self-portraits among several composed throughout the brief span of her life…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Tofufabrik

Tofufabrik was founded toward the end of the 1990s by György Debreceni and Heike Hellerung, pioneers of the “bio tofu scene” in Hessen. What started as a small, local supplier of organic bean curd…

Venues

Lala Rukh
Introduction by Natasha Ginwala

An ink drawing entitled Hieroglyphics I: Koi ashiq kisi mehbooba se 1 (1995) unfolds Lala Rukh’s secret language, a constellation of calligraphic form, Minimalism, and symbolic writing. Borrowing her…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #22: Ernste Spiele I–IV (Serious Games I–IV)

by Harun Farocki

Images of war pervade our screens, streaming in real time, impossible to ignore. Harun Farocki’s Serious Games reminds us that this spectacle is only one aspect of the mediatization of combat: the image does not simply picture war, but is also an instrument of warfare…

Public TV

Taci, anzi parla

by Barbara Casavecchia

Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Boats of History

with Giorgos Maniatis, Servanne Jollivet, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Anna Papaeti, and Nelli Kampouri

The session of talks and debates surrounding the political history of the Mediterranean takes place on a boat sailing along the coast of Athens and the Piraeus Port. There is no better place than a boat…

Calendar

Material Matters Library

The “Material Matters” library is a collection of objects and sounds that have been entrusted to aneducation by documenta 14 artists…

Public Education

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]