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

Ahlam Shibli

According to what Ahlam Shibli told me, the two photographic “reportages”—I use the term here for want of space to debate it—that will be presented at documenta 14 have precedents in her work…

Artists

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

It’s been nearly three years since we first embarked on the journey toward South as a State of Mind, the magazine of documenta 14, edited and produced in and out of Athens. The issue you hold, our…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Black Athena Reloaded 2: A Trial of the Code Noir

with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès

Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…

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

Numismatic Museum

This museum is housed in a former private home designed by Ernst Ziller for German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Its interior—once the height of opulence—reflects the influence of archaeological…

Venues

George Maciunas

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof)

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)…

Venues

From Logocular Anthropotechnics to Posthuman Dispositives: Toward a Manifesto of the Postdiscursive Era

by Sotirios Bahtsetzis, with images by Christos Karakepelis

What is the future of the human, and what is the role that art has to play in determining this future? After philosophical thinking has determined the “end of man,” or as Jacques Derrida aptly put…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #19: 48

by Susana de Sousa Dias

A face appears in Susana de Sousa Dias’ 48 — the profile of a young woman, a black-and-white photograph, taken decades ago. Her face is stern, proud, austere. Yet she weeps. She tells a tale of humiliation, frustration, and defeat. She has no name, no age, no flesh…

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]

#2

by Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri is professor of Theory of the State at the University of Padua. Negri actively collaborated in the debates and struggles of workers of the Italian radical left during the 1960s and 1970s…

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

The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt

by Aristide Antonas

In Greek, the word κείμενο (keímeno) has a double meaning. As an adjective, keímeno describes something that has fallen or toppled over, but the ancient adjective is also the Modern Greek noun…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]