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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

A Confession of Love

by Artur Żmijewski

On 25 October 2015, Polish parliamentary elections were won decisively by the Law and Justice (PiS) party. A few months earlier, in May of last year, the party’s candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential…

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Notes

Ulrich Wüst

When documenta was founded and first organized in the West German city of Kassel in 1955, a proverbial stone’s throw away from the border separating West from East, “capitalism” from “communism,”…

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Artists

They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with an introduction by Laura Preston

Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#20 Transgressive Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Synaesthetics of the Polity (forthcoming, 2018); The Perils…

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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

Numismatic Museum

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…

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Venues

Alexander Kalderach

Very little is known about Alexander Kalderach, who was born in Hamburg in 1880 and died in Bern in 1965. The acme of his painting career was in the 1940s, when his work was included in the Grosse Deutsche…

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Historical Positions

Palais Bellevue

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…

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Venues

Keimena #20: Inventur – Metzstraße 11 and Logbook_Serbistan

by Želimir Žilnik

In the forty years between Inventur - Metzstrasse 11 and Logbook_Serbistan, Želimir Žilnik never ceased to give voice to the disenfranchised. Made in 1975, Inventur belongs to Žilnik's German period, when he fled Yugoslavia following the collapse of the “black wave” generation of Yugoslavian cinema of which the Serbian’ director was a key member…

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Public TV

Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword*

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

VOICE-O-GRAPH

by Panos Charalambous with Vassilis Charalambidis, Angelos Krallis, Panayotis Panopoulos

VOICE–O–GRAPH is a vinyl work of discovery, preservation, reuse and manipulation. A happening that manifests itself with objects of immediate urgency. Coming from either forgotten, censored, or disintegrated…

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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

The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate:
Adam Szymczyk in conversation with Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, and Hans Haacke

To reiterate the facts about the now well known but as yet unseen Gurlitt estate: it consists of artworks and art objects amassed by the German art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956)…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]