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.…
“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
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…
To introduce Korean women’s poetry in the space of five minutes would be as difficult as shrinking five thousand years into five minutes. The Korean male literary establishment differentiates and categorizes…
Located in Kypseli, a northern neighborhood of central Athens, the open-air cinema Stella sits like a blank frame set within a densely urban environment. Named after the strong-willed character played…
documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station)…
Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is an exquisite meditation on death, dignity and voyeurism that unfurls like a baroque tapestry. Visionary Catalan filmmaker and artist Albert Serra is contemporary cinema’s master historicist…
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…
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…
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…
