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 thirtysomething and fortysomething generations in the Arab world (to which I belong) are the children of a generation that once believed they could change the world and reverse the order of their societies. They fought to realize their dream and were defeated. We, their offspring, have come into adulthood and consciousness of the world as their dreams and defeats have resulted in sinister schemes of despotism. All they had left to give us to face the world and guard us against the torment of its ruthlessness was their sorrow. Thus has sorrow become our skin: the skin of our cities, the skin of our voices, the skin that warms, and with which we love.”
—Rasha Salti
In the desire to explore noise and improvisation in social and political terms, Mattin, along with publishing books, sets up situations for the “exhibition as concert.” This took form, for example…
There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary…
Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.
Founded in 1950 through the enthusiasm of the Athens Association of Film Critics, it wasn’t until the 1960s that key members of the association, artists and writers, formalized their activities to establish…
Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904–80) was a leading modernist artist and teacher at Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts) in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Besides working with drawing, wax sculptures, collage…
The Giesshaus (foundry) was built as part of the Henschelei, a factory established in the nineteenth century by the industrialist family Henschel, which specialized in the construction of locomotives…
by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad
Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…
Passing Drama by Angela Melitopoulos revolves around the great population displacement that followed the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. The title plays with the double meaning of the word “Drama.” Implying tragedy and turmoil, Drama is also the name of the town where Melitopoulos’s grandparents settled after the Lausanne convention in 1923…
“Will there be time to make myself a mask when I emerge from the shadows?” is a question Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself in “The Green Table,” a poem of fragments, queries, and laments in which…
with Andrew Feinstein, Johan Grimonprez, and Marina Fokidis
A discussion on Democracy and War with Andrew Feinstein, author, and Johan Grimonprez, artist moderated by Marina Fokidis, Head of documenta 14 Artistic Office, Athens
Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…
