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

The Transit of Hermes

by Ross Birrell

The Athens-Kassel Ride—a mobile, participatory, human-equine ensemble performed over 100 days—is a 3000 km equestrian long ride across Europe linking the two cities of documenta 14…

Notes

With majestic buildings as arteries and tree-lined boulevards, Omonoia Square begins life on paper as the heart of Bavarian rule. What happened to the foundation stone laid there in honor of King Otto?…

Artists

Lives and Works of Lorenza Böttner

by Paul B. Preciado

Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Initiativgruppe Griechenland – Erinnerung als Widerstand (Initiative Group Greece – Remembrance as Resistance)

with Skevos Papaioannou, Geert Platner, Erika Wittlinger, and other members of the Initiative Group

“The working title of this year’s documenta and the artistic director’s appeal for stories prompted us to form an initiative group which has made preparations for several events and activities under…

Calendar

Interview with Mounira Al Solh

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

Temple of Olympian Zeus

One of the largest temples of the ancient world, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was first planned in 515 BC by Peisistratus the Young. Construction, however, stalled for more than six hundred years and only…

Venues

David Perlov

Filmmaker David Perlov was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930 and passed away in Tel Aviv in 2003. In 1957, he made his first short film, Old Aunt China, an animation based on sarcastic drawings and texts…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

CineStar

At documenta 14 in Athens, Douglas Gordon chose the open-air movie theater Stella for the presentation of I had nowhere to go (2016), his cinematic portrait of the avant-garde filmer Jonas Mekas, thus…

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 #8: Ku Qian (Bitter Money)

by Wang Bing

“Time is money (bastard)” sang the Swans in 1986. The same refrain—deprived of its punk rage—drives the subjects of Wang Bing’s Bitter Money. The film follows country people moving to the city to be employed as textile workers on daily or seasonal contracts…

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]

Introduction to the Society of the Indigenous

with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kampouri, and Margarita Tsomou

By establishing the notion of ithageneia (the Greek word for "indigenous") as a condition, The Apatride Society tries to go beyond a Eurocentric perspective, while encouraging the observation of the shifting…

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

Representing Misery: Courbet’s Beggar Woman

by Linda Nochlin

Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]