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

A Confession of Love

by Artur Żmijewski

On 25 October 2015, Polish parliamentary elections were won decisively by the Law and Justice (PiS) party. A few months earlier, in May of last year, the party’s candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential…

Notes

Angelo Plessas

As I walked back from the communal showers, I paused at the gate to take in the scene. It looked like a kid’s drawing of a small village, straw huts on the edge of the desert. The sun was rising over…

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]

#13 Epitafios II

by Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou and MiniMaximum ImproVision

Epitafios II is a collaboration between professional actors, musicians, students, performers, and the audience. A blanket of human bodies and objects covers the floor of the former headquarters of the…

Calendar

Interview with Olaf Holzapfel

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

Elpidos 13, Victoria Square

From the storefront of no. 13 on this pedestrian street, it is a short walk to Victoria Square, a low-key crossroads for people of myriad nationalities, newly settled or passing through Greece. In Spring…

Venues

Anna “Asja” Lācis

1891–1938
Born in Ķempji, Latvia in 1891; moves to Riga in 1898. Studies at Vladimir Bekhterev's Institute of Psychoneurological Research in St. Petersburg (1912–13), Šanjavskij Cultural University…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Torwache

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…

Venues

Envoy: Angel of Post-History

by Ross Birrell

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #33: Pays Barbare (Barbaric Land)

by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

In Barbaric Land, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian ask, ‘What is fascism?’ How is it born, how is it rooted, and what unites its different strains? Composed of archival documentary material, their film descends into the darkest period of Italian history…

Public TV

The Mask of Language: Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik

by Quinn Latimer

“Will there be time to make myself a mask when I emerge from the shadows?” is a question Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself in “The Green Table,” a poem of fragments, queries, and laments in which…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Our Common Ghosts

with Christian Nyampeta and Isaïe Nzeyimana

In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives 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

“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence

by Angela Dimitrakaki

It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]