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

Piotr Uklański

In 1711, in an essay for The Spectator, Joseph Addison defined wordplay as a “kind of false wit,” a petulant “jingle of words . . . comprehended under the general name of Punning.” The fraudulence…

Artists

Blood Is Flowing in Carthage: Simone Weil between Force and Colonialism

by Richard Fletcher

The destruction of ancient Carthage served as the inspiration for a work by Italian artist Lara Favaretto in the inaugural (and so far only) Carthage Contemporary exhibition, titled Chkoun Ahna (meaning…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

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…

Calendar

Interview with Maria Hassabi

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

Tositsa 5

Between 1974 and 1976, following the end of the dictatorship in Greece, the store on Tositsa 5 in Exarcheia was activated as the first artist-run space in Athens, called Center for the Fine Arts and founded…

Venues

Alexander Kalderach

Very little is known about Alexander Kalderach, who was born in Hamburg in 1880 and died in Bern in 1965. The acme of his painting career was in the 1940s, when his work was included in the Grosse Deutsche…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Henschel-Hallen

Since the closing of the Henschel factory during World War II—once a pivotal site in German industrialization and the development of military technology—the Henschel-Hallen today stand empty, to be…

Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

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…

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]

Indigenous Knowledge 1: On Violent Waters. A Discussion on Borders and Migration

with Dimitris Parsanoglou, Maria Iorio, and Raphaël Cuomo

In contemporary discussions of European borders, the sea stands as a silent and invisible yet violent medium that accentuates the tragic or heroic border crossings of migrants and refugees. Although it…

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

Two Poems

by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]