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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

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…

Notes

El Hadji Sy

Recall to the early 1990s and a meeting with El Hadji Sy in his studio in Dakar: I remember having difficulty photographing his paintings in isolation. Sy engineers my vision so that every shot contains…

Artists

Signals from Another World: Proletarian Theater as a Site for Education
Texts by Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, with an introduction by Andris Brinkmanis

What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Initiativgruppe Griechenland – Erinnerung als Widerstand (Initiative Group Greece – Remembrance as Resistance)

with Skevos Papaioannou, Geert Platner, Erika Wittlinger, and other members of the Initiative Group

“The working title of this year’s documenta and the artistic director’s appeal for stories prompted us to form an initiative group which has made preparations for several events and activities under…

Calendar

Interview with Akinbode Akinbiyi

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

Ivan Wyschnegradsky

An avant-garde composer, Ivan Wyshnegradsky’s research into microtonal music was inspired by Mikhail Matyushin. In the 1940s, already living in France, Wyschnegradsky started using colors to describe…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum

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…

Venues

YSL / New Waves

by Nairy Baghramian

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #32: Le Président (The President)

by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

The President, by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, is a witty, poetic, and humorous take on the ugly reality of power in postcolonial Africa. States ruled by men who cling to power, craving immortality. Men like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, or Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Under their omnipotent rule, even to imagine a state after them is a crime…

Public TV

Occupy Collections!*
Clémentine Deliss in conversation with Frédéric Keck on access, circulation, and interdisciplinary experimentation, or the urgency of remediating ethnographic collections (before it is really too late).

Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Blood Memory

with Lala Meredith-Vula and Arnisa Zeqo

In the 1990s, a civil movement organized at grassroots level by students and villagers to try to reconcile the thousands of feuding families around Kosova. These blood feuds were based on an old law that…

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

Representing Misery: Courbet’s Beggar Woman

by Linda Nochlin

Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]