Menu
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.

 More
News

Honeymoon in Chaospolis & (Not very) proper names

by Mustapha Benfodil

To Paris!
To all the victims
of liberticidal barbarity…

Honeymoon in Chaospolis

We met each other in Tunis
We loved each other in Gaza
We missed each other in Beirut
We kissed in Paris
We got married in Algiers
We…

 More
Notes

Miriam Cahn

Niggling questions

Is Miriam Cahn, born in Basel in 1949, a realist artist? What can be seen in her drawings, performances, films, and paintings—and what cannot? Where does the difference lie between…

 More
Artists

A Reading That Loves
The Distance between V and W
Objects in Diaspora

by Yael Davids

I begin with—
Our tiny house in the kibbutz. A narrow wooden door with a small window above it, separating the kitchen from the toilet. 

On the day when this small window was broken, my father lifted…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#18 Soundscapes of Detention: Music and Torture under the Junta (1967–74)

by Anna Papaeti

Although torture under the Greek military junta (1967–74) has been subject to scrutiny, with important trials in Strasbourg (1968–69) and Greece (the so-called “Torturers’ Trials,” 1975), the…

 More
Calendar
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…

 More
Publications

Coastline

Cecilia Vicuña completes the Athenian chapter of her documenta 14 project by way of a ritual offering to the sea gods of ancient Hellenic lore. The sacrifice in question consists of Vicuña presenting…

 More
Venues

Conrad Felixmüller

Conrad Felixmüller was born in Dresden in 1897, where he studied with the Hessian realist painter Carl Bantzer. He was a founding member of the avant-garde artist collective Novembergruppe, and a member…

 More
Historical Positions

Friedrichsplatz

Constructed in the late eighteenth century as a way to expand Kassel from the old medieval town toward the flourishing Huguenot settlement nearby, Friedrichsplatz has often been employed as an arena for…

 More
Venues

Keimena #20: Inventur – Metzstraße 11 and Logbook_Serbistan

by Želimir Žilnik

In the forty years between Inventur - Metzstrasse 11 and Logbook_Serbistan, Želimir Žilnik never ceased to give voice to the disenfranchised. Made in 1975, Inventur belongs to Žilnik's German period, when he fled Yugoslavia following the collapse of the “black wave” generation of Yugoslavian cinema of which the Serbian’ director was a key member…

 More
Public TV

Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought

by Andreas Angelidakis

John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Debt and Migration in the Postcolony. An Enquiry into Greece’s Crisis

with Ranabir Samaddar and The Apatride Society of the Political Others, Lena Platonos, Savina Yannatou, Stergios Tsirliagos and The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión

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…

 More
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…

 More
Public Education

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

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…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]