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.…
As the days pass by And you gain in years The past does not keep you captive. —K. G. Subramanyan, from “A Near Vision” (Poems: Rhymes of Recall, Seagull Books, 2014)
When Arin Rungjang speaks about history, he uses a vocabulary associated with rumor and hearsay: history is neither fact nor uncontested. For Rungjang, who was born in Bangkok in 1975, the contention is…
Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…
In this talk, Gómez-Barris asks how we might decolonize memory to activate different potential alternative and anti-capitalist futures. Specifically, the talk addresses how the evacuation of colonial…
This museum, founded in 1885, is filled with inscriptions dating from the eighth century BCE to the late Roman period—there are economic accounts, treaties, decrees, sacred laws, funerary stelae, and…
When Dmitri Prigov first tried to exhibit his “Appeals to the Citizens” in public spaces in Moscow—pasting them onto electricity poles or pinning them to trees—he was arrested and sent to a psychiatric…
While Olu Oguibe’s project in Athens, The Biafra Time Capsule (2017), deals with an archive of the human tragedy of the Biafra War (1967–70), his work in Kassel refers to a critical humanitarianism…
The entwined edifice of history, the archive, and the written word have long been the subject of critique within Western theory. However, what might yet be learned from turning our attention to traditions…
Gym Lumbera’s Ának Araw begins with words on the screen: a procession of basic English nouns accompanied by pictographic representations. These are followed by their live-action representations, subtitled in Tagalog. Words, but no dialogue…
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…
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…
The case of AKP, an eighty-year-old Polish immigrant in England described by neuropsychologist Chris Moulin et al. in a 2005 paper in the journal Neuropsychologia, is one of many prominent examples of…
