Menu
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.

 More
News

David Perlov (1930–2003)

When Israeli filmmaker David Perlov died, he left behind dozens of Hefte (notebooks), filled with epigrams, texts for films, biographical notes, images interwoven with texts, and texts with images. Yet…

 More
Notes

Antonio Vega Macotela

I can see in his face that he is totally beat. He walked around in his studio all night long to collect his own sweat, which he wants to store in bottles for his Studies of Exhaustion. From what I can…

 More
Artists

Ahlam Shibli’s Occupation
Introduction by Ulrich Loock

Every single photograph of the work is permeated by the violence that the Israeli state exercises against the people of al-Khalil/Hebron, and all of the Palestinian people, in the occupied West Bank—through…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Matter Form Facture

with Geeta Kapur and Natasha Ginwala

The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity…

 More
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…

 More
Publications

Monument Madra Blokou Kokkinias

On August 17, 1944, Nazi troops executed seventy-five members of the Greek Resistance at the old factory of the British Oriental Carpet company in the neighborhood of Kokkinia (known also as Nikaia). Hundreds…

 More
Venues

Friedrichsplatz

Constructed in the late eighteenth century as a way to expand Kassel from the old medieval town toward the flourishing Huguenot settlement nearby, Friedrichsplatz has often been employed as an arena for…

 More
Venues

Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty-First Century

by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…

 More
South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #35: Louomenoi (Bathers)

by Eva Stefani

The title of Eva Stefani’s Bathers points to a painterly tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the advent of leisure, the nudist movement, and love for nature. Its most famous examples are the Bathers of Edgar Degas or Paul Cézanne…

 More
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…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Communism will be the collective management of alienation*

with Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Dimitra Kotouza, Mattin, and Paul B. Preciado

Previous revolutionary theories thought that it was possible to live in unalienated conditions. However, the question of mediation and how we understand ourselves is being radically challenged today: technology…

 More
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…

 More
Public Education