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

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

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…

Notes

Sokol Beqiri

As visual reminiscences and artistic responses to the bestialities of war, the works of Sokol Beqiri from the early 2000s also speak to the omnipresence of crime in the city where he was born in 1964…

Artists

Double Gambit: Katerina Koskina and Adam Szymczyk in Conversation with Domenick Ammirati

The collaboration between documenta 14 and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) seemed both inevitable and unlikely. But no more unlikely than documenta 14 dividing like a replicating…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

The Parliament of Bodies: The Strategy of Joy

with Ross Birrell, Nita Deda, Hendrik Folkerts, Dimitris Ginosatis, Natasha Ginwala, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Candice Hopkins, iQhiya, Élisabeth Lebovici, Catherine Malabou, Joar Nango, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Paul B. Preciado, Ibrahim Quraishi, Roee Rosen, Dim Sampaio, and Adam Szymczyk

A paradox lies at the heart of contemporary democratic societies concerning the center of the politics of representations of their parliaments: They have gradually turned into ensembles joined by fear…

Calendar

Interview with Regina José Galindo

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

Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Internationally renowned as a stage and costume designer, Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989) also painted prolifically in a style both modernist and sensual. He was celebrated across divisions of sex, class…

Venues

Sunil Janah

The Bengal Famine 1943–44 wrecked over three million lives across undivided India during the Second World War while its colonized subjects supported the Western war effort leading to a diversion of food…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

documenta Halle

Beyond its obvious postmodern invocations, documenta Halle seems like a body reclining on the slope that brings visitors from Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie and Karlsaue park—an organism of steel and…

Venues

The Aesthetics of Hunger and The Aesthetics of Dreaming

by Glauber Rocha

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #11: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans)

by Narimane Mari

Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…

Public TV

Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword*

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Gordon Hookey: Summoning Time. Painting & Politikill Transition in MURRILAND!

with Gordon Hookey, Johannes Fabian, Ali Moraly, Vivian Ziherl, and Hendrik Folkerts

Taking the work of Gordon Hookey in Kassel and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu in Athens as a point of departure, this public conversation between Hookey, Frontier Imaginaries curator Vivian Ziherl, and anthropologist…

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

Like a Riot: The Politics of Forgetfulness, Relearning the South, and the Island of Dr. Moreau

by Françoise Vergès

The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]