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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

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

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…

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Notes

Manthia Diawara

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…

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Artists

Lost and Found

by Susan Hiller

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

WICHITA
(dormant)
Oklahoma…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#5 Freedom as Market Value. Freedom as Practice of Resistance

by Judith Revel

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…

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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

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika Gallery, Benaki Museum

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…

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Venues

Franz Boas

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…

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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

Keimena #18: Nespatřené (The Unseen)

by Miroslav Janek

“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…

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Public TV

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Silence 1

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…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

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

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