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.…
I first met Pauline Oliveros in 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio. Pianist David Tudor had been asked to perform a concert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and invited Pauline and I to join him. I…
As visual reminiscences and artistic responses to the bestialities of war, the works of Sokol Beqiri from the early 2000s also speak to the omnipresence of crime in the city where he was born in 1964…
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…
Between 1958 and 1965, the Dutch artist and composer Sedje Hémon kept a chronologically ordered (but not dated) record of 600 numbered notes tracing the development of her method of integrating visual…
Due to its prominent location in front of the Greek Parliament, the central square of Athens has long served as the starting and ending point for many assemblies and demonstrations. Its original name was…
Iver Jåks was born in Karasjok in northern Norway and is one of the most influential artists from the region. His unique impact on the development of Norwegian modernism is manifest in his installations…
To many visitors to documenta, if not most, Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe Train Station, constructed to replace what is now known as the KulturBahnhof closer to the city center, affords the first glimpse and impression…
I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger. Hunger is abstract, and…
Cemetery of Splendour is Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s seventh feature film. In a provincial city in Thailand’s northeast, soldiers deployed on a construction project come down with a strange sleeping sickness and receive treatment in a makeshift clinic. A friendship develops between two of their volunteer carers, who discover that the soldiers’ digging has disturbed an ancient royal cemetery said to lie beneath the clinic, and that this has caused their mysterious illness…
Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…
U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…
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…
