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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.

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News
„Als Ludwig I. von Bayern in seiner philhellenischen Begeisterung seinen Sohn Otto samt der bayrischen Bürokratie auf den Thron des neuen, befreiten Griechenland setzte, schiffte sich sein Minister Rudhard, ein Sohn Passaus, von seiner Heimatstadt aus direkt nach Athen ein; er trank während der Reise aus einem eigens mitgeführten Bierfaß und sang dabei bajuwarische Lieder, in denen ein Hans Jörgl hinter seiner Liesl herläuft. Die in Griechenland eingesetzte Bavarokratie sorgte in Athen sogleich für die Eröffnung einer großen Brauerei sowie von Lokalen, die — wie von Wastlhuber, der geheime Ministerial-Kanzlei-Konzipist, sagte — ,Athen in eine Vorstadt Münchens’ verwandelten.“
—Claudio Magris
Notes

Vija Celmins

In his accounts from the thirteenth century, Marco Polo distinguished the “Region of Obscurity,” the furthest reaches from the known, as lacking stars. Often recorded in travelogues, stargazing has…

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Artists

Signals from Another World: Proletarian Theater as a Site for Education
Texts by Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, with an introduction by Andris Brinkmanis

What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Blood Memory

with Lala Meredith-Vula and Arnisa Zeqo

In the 1990s, a civil movement organized at grassroots level by students and villagers to try to reconcile the thousands of feuding families around Kosova. These blood feuds were based on an old law that…

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Calendar
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…

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Publications

Filopappou Hill, Pikionis Paths and Pavilion

Filopappou Hill takes its name from Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, a consul and administrator under the Roman emperor Hadrian; it is also known as the Hill of the Muses, and it is where…

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Venues

Max Liebermann

Max Liebermann can easily be considered Germany’s leading impressionist painter. For the last decade and a half of his life he was also president of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, until he was…

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Historical Positions

Königsplatz

While Olu Oguibe’s project in Athens, The Biafra Time Capsule (2017), deals with an archive of the human tragedy of the Biafra War (1967–70), his work in Kassel refers to a critical humanitarianism…

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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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #11: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans)

by Narimane Mari

Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…

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Public TV

To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

by Elsa Dorlin

Pathogenic Subjectivity

Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#29 Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism

by Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky…

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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…

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Public Education

“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence

by Angela Dimitrakaki

It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]