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.…
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…
In his accounts from the thirteenth century, Marco Polo distinguished the “Region of Obscurity,” the furthest reaches from the known, as lacking stars. Often recorded in travelogues, stargazing has…
I visited photographer John Miller’s studio in 2015, on the recommendation of friends and colleagues who reside in New Zealand. I had just met with art writer Jon Bywater in Auckland, who confirmed the…
Twenty years ago, the No One is Illegal campaign was established as a decentralized network of anti-racist, migrant, and refugee-solidarity groups within documenta X’s Hybrid Workspace. Since then, it…
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the revolution that created modern Greece in 1821, the Greek peninsula was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Housed in a restored neoclassical villa, the…
Having opened its doors to the public in September 2015, Grimmwelt is the latest addition to Kassel’s museum landscape: perched atop the so-called Weinberg, this museum devoted to the life, work, and…
It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…
Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…
The Apatride Society invites feminist activist and artist Click Ngwere and scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva to reflect and work on the fabric of contemporary capitalism. Together they look into the global…
When, in 1944, Jonas Mekas left the small village in Lithuania where he grew up, he was twenty-two years old and a man of “some reputation,” as he puts it. Editor-in-chief of a weekly paper and a young…
