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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

Maria Lai (1919–2013)

While living with her aunt and uncle near Cardedu in the Sardinian countryside due to poor health, as a child Maria Lai traced bold sketches on the walls of their kitchen with charcoal from the fireplace…

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Notes

Banu Cennetoğlu

A photograph, hazy in the way old photos can be, reveals a young woman in traditional Kurdish costume, a clunky metal headdress atop her head. She doesn’t smile. In another, shoulder pads conspicuous…

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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…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Blood Memory

with Lala Meredith-Vula and Arnisa Zeqo

In the 1990s, a civil movement organized at grassroots level by students and villagers to try to reconcile the thousands of feuding families around Kosova. These blood feuds were based on an old law that…

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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

Elpidos 13, Victoria Square

From the storefront of no. 13 on this pedestrian street, it is a short walk to Victoria Square, a low-key crossroads for people of myriad nationalities, newly settled or passing through Greece. In Spring…

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Venues

André du Colombier

“Since beginning to know his work a bit better, I’ve come to think that this tall, curiously blond boy perceived us by way of clues—clues capable of entering savant equations, according to linguistic…

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Historical Positions

documenta Halle

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…

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Venues

Writing the Ecocide-Genocide Knot: Indigenous Knowledge and Critical Theory in the Endgame

by Gene Ray

Climate chaos, globalized toxicity, mass extinction. A global social process has altered the earth’s biophysical systems, destabilizing the climate and shifting the course of evolution. Ironically, knowledge…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #4: La Mort de Louis XIV

by Albert Serra

Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is an exquisite meditation on death, dignity and voyeurism that unfurls like a baroque tapestry. Visionary Catalan filmmaker and artist Albert Serra is contemporary cinema’s master historicist…

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Public TV

Bibliocaust

by Mustapha Benfodil

I am called BODY WRITING. Unidentified Verbose Object. ISBN: 978-1-14210-562-7. 197 pages, deletions included. 15 x 21 cm. Standard offset paper. Cover: a photograph by Mark Velasquez depicting a naked…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

How does it feel to be a problem?

This performative gathering establishes no hierarchies between radically different knowledge, languages, and practices, between activism and performance, between theory and poetry, between art and politics: collectively, we experiment with the construction of a public space of visibility and enunciation…

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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

Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation

by Manthia Diawara

Édouard Glissant’s seminal treatise Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of Relation) was published in 2008,2 at a time when the so-called nouveaux philosophes were taking sides in the debate about…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]