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

Meanwhile, Aboubakar Fofana contributes a text-ile to The documenta 14 Reader

by Monika Szewczyk

It took artist Aboubakar Fofana one day to set up a fructose-based indigo vat at the Mentis Center for the preservation of traditional textile techniques at 6 Polyfimou Street in Athens. It was December…

Notes

Aboubakar Fofana

Born in Mali in 1967, Aboubakar Fofana left the African continent at an early age for Paris. Fofana’s founding discipline was calligraphy. Fascinated by the sign and the trace, he drew on Western and…

Artists

Ahlam Shibli’s Occupation
Introduction by Ulrich Loock

Every single photograph of the work is permeated by the violence that the Israeli state exercises against the people of al-Khalil/Hebron, and all of the Palestinian people, in the occupied West Bank—through…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#22 I Owe You Everything

by Clémentine Deliss and Chief Robert Joseph

I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual…

Calendar

Interview with Andreas Angelidakis

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

Archaeological Museum of Piraeus

This significant museum features a complete depiction of an ancient Athens naval dockyard. Some of the pieces are extremely rare, in particular the famous bronze statues and a theatrical “tragedy mask”—all…

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

Gottschalk-Halle (University of Kassel)

Many threads of Kassel’s history are woven together in this abandoned warehouse. Built in the 1950s on a location belonging to two of the city’s most prominent industrial dynasties, Henschel company…

Venues

A Mighty Forest

by Dieter Roelstraete

It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #12: Krisis

by Dimitri Venkov

Dimitri Venkov’s Krisis is based on a Facebook discussion on December 8, 2013, the day that “Leninopad,” the widespread demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, kicked off in Ukraine. The first monument to be dismantled in Kyiv was made by Soviet sculptor Sergei Merkurov and was erected in 1946, while Stalin was still in power. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom) claimed responsibility…

Public TV

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The second issue of South as a State of Mind as the magazine of documenta 14 goes to print almost exactly one year before the inauguration of the exhibition in Athens, and fourteen months before the…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Shame on Us: A Reading and Discussion

with Franco “Bifo” Berardi

In response to the violence and volume of complaints and disparaging remarks received during the last week, we have decided to cancel Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s performance. We respect those who might…

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

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…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]