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

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…

Notes

Ross Birrell

Things tend to get personal, at times: I owe my acquaintance with Ross Birrell to Gustav Metzger, whose exhibition In Memoriam, dedicated to Walter Benjamin, I organized at Kunsthalle Basel in 2006. As…

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…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

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

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

Epigraphic Museum

This museum, founded in 1885, is filled with inscriptions dating from the eighth century BCE to the late Roman period—there are economic accounts, treaties, decrees, sacred laws, funerary stelae, and…

Venues

Hasan Reçi

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Ballhaus

The Ballhaus—Leo von Klenze’s first authored building—stands next to the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, the neoclassical palace of Kassel, inside the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. It was built in 1808 by Jérôme…

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 #17: Chamissos Schatten, Kapitel 1: Alaska und aleutische Inseln (Chamisso’s Shadow, Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands)

by Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamisso’s Shadow — Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands takes as its point of departure the accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso. The nineteenth-century botanist and poet was a voyager on the Romanzow research expedition, which aimed to find a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans…

Public TV

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Silence 1

The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-between…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

The Gesture of Hospitality

with Nathan Pohio, Hendrik Folkerts, and Candice Hopkins

Nathan Pohio comments on rituals of hospitality within Māori culture and the political implications of being a host and being a guest.

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

Incarceration

by Brandon Shimoda

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]