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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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…

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Notes

Sergio Zevallos

In his Émile perverti (1974), the philosopher and Charles Fourier scholar René Schérer describes how the modern, colonial, capitalist process of extracting and seizing the subject’s libidinal power…

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Artists

A Reading That Loves
The Distance between V and W
Objects in Diaspora

by Yael Davids

I begin with—
Our tiny house in the kibbutz. A narrow wooden door with a small window above it, separating the kitchen from the toilet. 

On the day when this small window was broken, my father lifted…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#18 Soundscapes of Detention: Music and Torture under the Junta (1967–74)

by Anna Papaeti

Although torture under the Greek military junta (1967–74) has been subject to scrutiny, with important trials in Strasbourg (1968–69) and Greece (the so-called “Torturers’ Trials,” 1975), the…

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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

Panathenaic Stadium/Hellenic Olympic Committee

First built in the fourth century BC during Lykourgos’s archonship in the ravine between Ardettos Hill and the Ilissos River, the Panathenaic Stadium was reconstructured during the reign of Roman emperor…

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Venues

Tina Modotti

The agronomist, freedom fighter, and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje was born in 1886 in British colonial India. Profoundly impacted by the Great Famine of 1896–97, Khankhoje remained acutely…

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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…

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Venues

So Many Hungers

by Natasha Ginwala

It is believed the spotted hyenas of Harar came to roam the city during the Ethiopian famine of 1888, surviving on organic refuse and human remains.1 Traveling through Ireland preceding the Great Hunger…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #24: Ának Araw

by Gym Lumbera

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…

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Public TV

Fair Trade Heads: A Conversation on Repatriation and Indigenous Peoples with Maria Thereza Alves, Candice Hopkins, and Jolene Rickard

The first documenta 14 edition of South as a State of Mind featured a roundtable discussion titled “The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate,” in which Adam Szymczyk spoke with a number of artists…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#25 An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual

An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.

Note: Please bring some…

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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

What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge

by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín

We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]