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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

Vija Celmins

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…

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Artists

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

I

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror 

or a whisper
on bare feet 

wearing only white

he slipped away 

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

An homage to Pavlos Fyssas

documenta 14 opened in Athens on April 6. That was also the day of remembrance for Halit Yozgat, who was killed at his family’s Internet café on Holländische Straße in the Nordstadt district of Kassel…

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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

Polytechniou 8

"A spring morning in the early 1950s, an excited group of young graduates crossed Patision avenue down to their favorite cafe on Polytechniou street. The wars were over, the sun was out, Athens was in…

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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

Nordstadtpark

Nordstadtpark in Kassel is full of people on any summer evening or weekend, a place of leisure for the truly multinational neighborhood, as well as for students at the University of Kassel and visitors…

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Venues

Enfleshment of Memory

by Neni Panourgiá

Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #29: Beuys

by Andres Veiel

Beuys, a film by Andres Veiel, is a thrilling portrait of one of the most controversial artists of the twentieth century…

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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]

Indigenous Knowledge 2: Fleeing and Occupying

with Olga Lafazani, Bahar Askavzadeh, and Brigitta Kuster

The Apatride Society of the Political Others moves on to engage with a different aspect of the ithageneia condition: that of migrant mobility and movement. Migrant mobility is as much a question of movement…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]