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.…
The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…
According to what Ahlam Shibli told me, the two photographic “reportages”—I use the term here for want of space to debate it—that will be presented at documenta 14 have precedents in her work…
Modernity has its forms, its laws, its fatal fantasies.1 Extinction is their logical drift. For five hundred years, ecocide and genocide have belonged to the dynamics, the very energetics, of modernity…
Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity…
Elpidos Street is the site of a performance by Regina José Galindo, in which the artist wears a dress kept by the family of a woman murdered in her native Guatemala. While the Victoria Square area is…
After its partial destruction during World War II, the Ottoneum performed a remarkable shift: from a theater—arguably the first theater building in Germany, constructed in the early seventeenth century—to…
It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…
Gym Lumbera’s Ának Araw begins with words on the screen: a procession of basic English nouns accompanied by pictographic representations. These are followed by their live-action representations, subtitled in Tagalog. Words, but no dialogue…
Mariana Castillo Deball’s contribution to this magazine is a series of contour drawings made by perforating pages from daily European newspapers. Crude, geometric, and, in their hypnotizing symmetry…
Reflecting on some of the inventive and resourceful methods developed by Ulises Carrión in later life, Magalí Arriola’s presentation will revisit his practice in order to analyze the reception of his work within the burgeoning Mexican art scene of the late 1990s…
Two stations after Dresden an elderly gentleman got into our compartment, passed the time of day civilly and then, looking up, expressly nodded to me as if I were an old acquaintance. At first I couldn’t…
