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

Iver Jåks (1932–2007)

When Iver Jåks first saw the light of day on a mountain near the village of Karasjok in Northern Norway in 1932, the Sámi did not have a word for “art.” Life, art, and craft were the same; the word…

 More
Notes

Marta Minujín

The Parthenon was built in Athens at the instigation of Pericles, under the supervision of the sculptor Phidias, between 447 and 38 BCE. The structure is ten meters high by seventy meters long and thirty…

 More
Artists

#20 Transgressive Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Synaesthetics of the Polity (forthcoming, 2018); The Perils…

 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

Temple of Olympian Zeus

One of the largest temples of the ancient world, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was first planned in 515 BC by Peisistratus the Young. Construction, however, stalled for more than six hundred years and only…

 More
Venues

August Spies

August Spies was born near Bad Hersfeld in central Hessen in 1855 and trained at the Polytechnikum in Kassel. Orphaned at age 17, he emigrated to the US, finally settling in Chicago in 1873, where he became…

 More
Historical Positions

Tofufabrik

Tofufabrik was founded toward the end of the 1990s by György Debreceni and Heike Hellerung, pioneers of the “bio tofu scene” in Hessen. What started as a small, local supplier of organic bean curd…

 More
Venues

To Create the Sound of Hunger: Joaquín Orellana in Conversation with Stefan Benchoam, Julio Santos, and Alejandro Torún, with an introduction by Monika Szewczyk

The Guatemalan composer and sound artist Joaquín Orellana is among the most important living members of South America’s musical avant-garde. In a career spanning half a century, his practice has combined…

 More
South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #15: Baghé Sangui (The Garden of Stones)

by Parviz Kimiavi

The Garden of Stones, by Parviz Kimiavi, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1976. Born in Tehran in 1939 and now living in Paris, Kimiavi is a cult figure in the Iranian New Wave. He studied film and photography at l'École Louis Lumière in Paris and worked in French television before returning to Iran in 1969, where he became a pioneering figure in Iran’s alternative cinema scene…

 More
Public TV

When the Dead Silently Speak Out

by Subcomandante Marcos

(Rewind 1)

(A text which reflects on those who are absent and on biographies, narrates Durito’s first encounter with the Cat-Dog, and talks about other things that may or may not be relevant, as the impertinent…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Debt and Migration in the Postcolony. An Enquiry into Greece’s Crisis

with Ranabir Samaddar and The Apatride Society of the Political Others, Lena Platonos, Savina Yannatou, Stergios Tsirliagos and The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión

In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…

 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

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]