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.…
Beau Dick was given the name “Walis Gwy Um,” which means “big, great whale” in the Kwak’wala language. His carvings tap into the supernatural, as though everything he made is invested with spirit…
On December 3, 2016, when we sat together in their Boston kitchen, María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard shared with me the recording of a friend’s voice:
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…
The EMST–National Museum of Contemporary Art, which has collected Greek and international art from the postwar period to the present since 2000, initially presenting a program in various temporary venues…
“Inside every human being there is a light, a sun, and through it, we are able to behold an external light, the external sun,” wrote Lamakh in one of his Books of Schemes. These books construct a cosmological…
Beyond its obvious postmodern invocations, documenta Halle seems like a body reclining on the slope that brings visitors from Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie and Karlsaue park—an organism of steel and…
Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…
How two people come apart can be as compelling to watch as what brings them together. In Clarie Denis’ film Voilà l’enchaînement, the fissures in a relationship between a black man (Alex Descas) and a white woman (Norah Krief) are apparent from the first scene. Longing for more closeness, and caressing his shoulder, she asks him to tattoo her name on his body. He gently refuses: “for you it means eternity, for me it means branded.” Does the friction of this early exchange—still light enough to be softened with an embrace, but opening a crack of enmity—set in motion what comes next…
Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…
