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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

We Are Dying—Take Care of the Right to the Image

by Abounaddara

In the spring of 2011, Syrians rose up against a dictatorship inherited from another era. Schoolchildren wrote “The emperor wears no clothes!” on the walls. Young people streamed into the streets and…

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Notes

iQhiya

There is something called the “hidden curriculum,” a term developed by educational theorists in the 1920s. If it were not so hidden, I could explain exactly what it is, but it always seems to conceal…

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Artists

They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with an introduction by Laura Preston

Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Rebuilding the Idea of a Global Left

with Naeem Mohaiemen, Vijay Prashad, Zonayed Saki, and Samia Zennadi

This four-evening seminar started from the desire to unpack some of the forgotten languages, broken dreams, and uncanny hopes that appear in Naeem Mohaiemen’s film for documenta 14 Kassel, Two Meetings…

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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

Benaki Museum—Pireos Street Annexe

The Benaki Museum was founded in 1930 by the collector Antonis Benakis. Born into an important family of the Greek diaspora, Benakis’s father, Emmanouil Benakis, was a Greek merchant and politician who…

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Venues

Sedje Hémon

It is obvious I have to solve this problem. From 1954 until 1958, so for four years, I listened halfheartedly to people who insisted that there is music present in my paintings. Since nobody could actually…

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Historical Positions

Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum

After its partial destruction during World War II, the Ottoneum performed a remarkable shift: from a theater—arguably the first theater building in Germany, constructed in the early seventeenth century—to…

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Venues

How to Write Painting: A Conversation about History Painting, Language, and Colonialism with Gordon Hookey, Hendrik Folkerts, and Vivian Ziherl

The entwined edifice of history, the archive, and the written word have long been the subject of critique within Western theory. However, what might yet be learned from turning our attention to traditions…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #1: From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

by CAMP

CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf describes a journey on the high seas. A group of sailors from the Kutch district in western India—along with fellow seafarers from southern Iran and the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Balochistan—transport goods and livestock in wooden vessels across the Persian and Aden gulfs…

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Public TV

Fair Trade Heads: A Conversation on Repatriation and Indigenous Peoples with Maria Thereza Alves, Candice Hopkins, and Jolene Rickard

The first documenta 14 edition of South as a State of Mind featured a roundtable discussion titled “The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate,” in which Adam Szymczyk spoke with a number of artists…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Introduction to the Society of the Indigenous

with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kampouri, and Margarita Tsomou

By establishing the notion of ithageneia (the Greek word for "indigenous") as a condition, The Apatride Society tries to go beyond a Eurocentric perspective, while encouraging the observation of the shifting…

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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

The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate:
Adam Szymczyk in conversation with Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, and Hans Haacke

To reiterate the facts about the now well known but as yet unseen Gurlitt estate: it consists of artworks and art objects amassed by the German art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956)…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]