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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

Listening to Matanzas

by Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…

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Notes

Máret Ánne Sara

On February 1, 2016, the town of Tana in Sápmi/Northern Norway awoke to the sight of 200 reindeer heads piled into a pyramid in front of the Indre Finnmark District Court. This was the day that young…

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Artists

Voyage of the Sable Venus

by Robin Coste Lewis

Prologue:

What follows is [an excerpt of] a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#22 I Owe You Everything

by Clémentine Deliss and Chief Robert Joseph

I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual…

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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

Megaron, The Athens Concert Hall

Inaugurated in 1991, Megaron was the outcome of the long efforts of an association of eminent social figures, musicians, and music lovers. The hall was built and has since operated on corporate, private…

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Venues

August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel

The journal Athenaeum was founded in 1798 in Berlin by the brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. It was discontinued in 1800, but its six issues stand as a defining statement of…

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Historical Positions

Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof)

documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station)…

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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 #16: Angriff auf die Demokratie – Eine Intervention (Democracy Under AttackAn Intervention)

by Romuald Karmakar

In December 2011, ten German intellectuals met in Berlin to discuss the current political crisis: how democracy had been undermined, weakened, hollowed out, and perverted by the so-called free market and its functions…

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Public TV

Mythopoeic Acts: Mariana Castillo Deball’s Newspaper Works

by Adam Szymczyk

Mariana Castillo Deball’s contribution to this magazine is a series of contour drawings made by perforating pages from daily European newspapers. Crude, geometric, and, in their hypnotizing symmetry…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.

with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…

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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

Always Struggle with the Object, Always Rewrite the World

by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Early in the winter of 2015, the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut quietly reopened its permanent display of Islamic art and architecture. Less a wing than a modest corner of a…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]