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.…
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…
Dénouement. When the miners’ uprising in Émile Zola’s Germinal reaches the fatal moment of dénouement, the novel’s plot unravels in a cathartic turn. The protagonist Étienne Lantier, sketched…
Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…
Ex-porn star and artist Annie Sprinkle and professor, sculptor, and video artist Beth Stephens fell in love at the beginning of the century. Their relationship triggered an artistic collaboration that…
In 1922, diplomat and bibliophile Joannes Gennadius offered his 26,000-volume library to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, on the conditions that the holdings be housed as a separate…
Many threads of Kassel’s history are woven together in this abandoned warehouse. Built in the 1950s on a location belonging to two of the city’s most prominent industrial dynasties, Henschel company…
For the past five winters, I have taught a course at the University of Chicago that consists of readings, screenings, discussion, and analysis of the work of the Brothers Grimm and their collecting and…
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present by Tyler Hubby is a vibrant documentary about a pioneering artist who defies easy description. Revered as an experimental musician and filmmaker, Tony Conrad was an underground icon from the early 1960s up until his death in 2016…
Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…
Niillas Somby is a Sámi political-rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer. He was one of the seven hunger strikers during the Alta controversy (1982) and lost an arm during a sabotage…
It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…
