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

“There are two ways of seeing the ways of seeing the world. One is one way and the other is another. And nobody knows: ‘Is there, anywhere, one way of seeing the two?’”
—Stefan Themerson

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

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror

or a whisper
on bare feet

wearing only white

he slipped away

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Boats of History

with Giorgos Maniatis, Servanne Jollivet, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Anna Papaeti, and Nelli Kampouri

The session of talks and debates surrounding the political history of the Mediterranean takes place on a boat sailing along the coast of Athens and the Piraeus Port. There is no better place than a boat…

Calendar

Interview with Regina José Galindo

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

Monument Madra Blokou Kokkinias

On August 17, 1944, Nazi troops executed seventy-five members of the Greek Resistance at the old factory of the British Oriental Carpet company in the neighborhood of Kokkinia (known also as Nikaia). Hundreds…

Venues

Valery Pavlovich Lamakh

“Inside every human being there is a light, a sun, and through it, we are able to behold an external light, the external sun,” wrote Lamakh in one of his Books of Schemes. These books construct a cosmological…

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

H+G

by Elizabeth Allen-Cannon, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Andrew Bearnot, Jan Brugger, Evan Carter, Kyle Hossli, Ben Nicholson, Shanna Zentner

Scene 1: Prologue

The stage is dark. Lighting is eerie and is slowly introduced as performers enter the stage. A slowed down version of the opening drum riff to Natti Vogel’s “Cannibal” plays. The…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #2: Sleepless Nights Stories

by Jonas Mekas

Sleepless Nights Stories originated from my reading of the One Thousand and One Nights. While my stories, unlike the Arabian tales, are all from the real life, they too, at some points wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality…

Public TV

Taci, anzi parla

by Barbara Casavecchia

Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#11 Torture and Freedom Tour of Athens

by Vangelis Karamanolakis, Tasos Sakellaropoulos, Kostis Karpozilos, and Katerina Labrinou

Collective walk through the city of Athens, in collaboration with ASKI archives, exploring the historical traces of oppression, violence, and the quest for freedom during the military dictatorship of 1967–74.

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

The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt

by Aristide Antonas

In Greek, the word κείμενο (keímeno) has a double meaning. As an adjective, keímeno describes something that has fallen or toppled over, but the ancient adjective is also the Modern Greek noun…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]