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.…
Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…
I often wonder what people mean when they say Kassel has changed over these past two years, during what has been called the “refugee crisis.” Has the city become more diverse? Are social and cultural…
Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…
with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès
Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…
The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…
Today’s Torwache is the remnant of a palatial building plan cut short by the Napoleonic wars and invasions of the early nineteenth century. Designed by local architect Heinrich Christoph Jussow, best…
For the past five winters, I have taught a course at the University of Chicago that consists of readings, screenings, discussion, and analysis of the work of the Brothers Grimm and their collecting and…
The title of Eva Stefani’s Bathers points to a painterly tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the advent of leisure, the nudist movement, and love for nature. Its most famous examples are the Bathers of Edgar Degas or Paul Cézanne…
The second issue of South as a State of Mind as the magazine of documenta 14 goes to print almost exactly one year before the inauguration of the exhibition in Athens, and fourteen months before the…
In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…
