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.…
I first met Pauline Oliveros in 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio. Pianist David Tudor had been asked to perform a concert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and invited Pauline and I to join him. I…
“Throughout this depiction of the Crusaders, of the Crusades, from which the cross is so curiously absent, except on the ornaments of the indignant patriarch on the left, it is as though there is an…
When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…
This museum is housed in a former private home designed by Ernst Ziller for German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Its interior—once the height of opulence—reflects the influence of archaeological…
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…
Today’s Torwache is the remnant of a palatial building plan cut short by the Napoleonic wars and invasions of the early nineteenth century. Designed by local architect Heinrich Christoph Jussow, best…
My father, the agronomist and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje, was born in 1886 in British colonial India, the son of a Marathi vakil, a petition writer in the courts of law, and the grandson…
Images of war pervade our screens, streaming in real time, impossible to ignore. Harun Farocki’s Serious Games reminds us that this spectacle is only one aspect of the mediatization of combat: the image does not simply picture war, but is also an instrument of warfare…
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…
In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…
The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…
