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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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…

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Notes

Ulrich Wüst

When documenta was founded and first organized in the West German city of Kassel in 1955, a proverbial stone’s throw away from the border separating West from East, “capitalism” from “communism,”…

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Artists

Treaty and Protest: John Miller’s Photographs by Cassandra Barnett and Jon Bywater, with an introduction by Marina Fokidis

I visited photographer John Miller’s studio in 2015, on the recommendation of friends and colleagues who reside in New Zealand. I had just met with art writer Jon Bywater in Auckland, who confirmed the…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Boats of History

with Giorgos Maniatis, Servanne Jollivet, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Anna Papaeti, and Nelli Kampouri

The session of talks and debates surrounding the political history of the Mediterranean takes place on a boat sailing along the coast of Athens and the Piraeus Port. There is no better place than a boat…

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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

Filopappou Hill, Pikionis Paths and Pavilion

Filopappou Hill takes its name from Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, a consul and administrator under the Roman emperor Hadrian; it is also known as the Hill of the Muses, and it is where…

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Venues

Karlsaue Park

Measuring 1.5 square kilometers in total, the Auepark or Karlsaue, so named after its patron Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, is the tautly composed, arch-symmetrical Baroque counterpoint to the sprawling…

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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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #38: Ismyrna (Ismyrne)

by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Ismyrne, co-directed by the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, tackles issues of identity, belonging, and nationalism…

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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…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Never-Closing

with Sergio Zevallos and members of the Open Form Societies

July 15, 2017, 4 pm
Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municipality Arts Center, Athens…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]