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.…
The Syrian who wanted the revolution is not in opposition. S/he does not belong to the system of opposition, the product of a power struggle in Assad’s Syria. S/he did not go out onto the streets to…
Beau Dick’s name in the Kwakw’ala language means “big, great whale.” His carvings often feature Dzunuk’wa, the “wild woman of the woods,” and her counterpart, Bakwas, “wild man of the woods.”…
The Goran people of Kosovo live in Lubinje, a remote village at the foot of the Sharr Mountains. They have a tradition of dressing and making up the bride on her wedding day, covering the whole body in…
Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky…
Greece’s third oldest university, established in 1920, is situated on either side of Iera Odos. This ancient “sacred way” was established some four thousand years ago, serving religious processions…
Arnold Bode is best known today as the founder of documenta and the driving force behind its first four editions (1955–64). Born in Kassel in 1900, Bode initially trained as an artist, while he was also…
One of the few historical structures in the center of Kassel to have survived the devastation of World War II relatively unscathed, the Palais Bellevue was built in the early years of the eighteenth century…
The entwined edifice of history, the archive, and the written word have long been the subject of critique within Western theory. However, what might yet be learned from turning our attention to traditions…
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…
John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…
with Skevos Papaioannou, Geert Platner, Erika Wittlinger, and other members of the Initiative Group
“The working title of this year’s documenta and the artistic director’s appeal for stories prompted us to form an initiative group which has made preparations for several events and activities under…
Landing page and following images: Sven Stilinović, Marx and Stilinović (1980), three black-and-white photographs, sheet of paper with text, corduroy cover
