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.…
Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…
In August 2008, Manthia Diawara returned to Bamako, Mali, where he was born in 1953, to film rehearsals for an opera performed by an all-African cast on a stage specially erected on the banks of the Niger…
BO (recently extinct) Andaman Islands, India Speaker: Boa Sr, the last speaker of Bo (1925–2010) Recorded by: Anvita Abbi, 2005–10 Source: Harmeet Shah Singh, CNN
What does it mean to be free when the market exceedingly places the demand on individuals to be free, creative, autonomous, and striving? What is the difference between what Foucault, since the end of…
This house, which belonged to the modernist artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, is a typical example of interwar Athenian architecture. The mansion was a meeting point for the Athenian intelligentsia of…
The German anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) is shown posing for a diorama of the Hamat’sa ceremony for the then U.S. National Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution)—a ceremony that is…
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…
“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…
The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-between…
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…