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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

Antonio Vega Macotela

I can see in his face that he is totally beat. He walked around in his studio all night long to collect his own sweat, which he wants to store in bottles for his Studies of Exhaustion. From what I can…

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Artists

Blood Is Flowing in Carthage: Simone Weil between Force and Colonialism

by Richard Fletcher

The destruction of ancient Carthage served as the inspiration for a work by Italian artist Lara Favaretto in the inaugural (and so far only) Carthage Contemporary exhibition, titled Chkoun Ahna (meaning…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#17 Red Star, Crescent Moon / after Sohail Daulatzai

by Naeem Mohaiemen

In Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012), scholar Sohail Daulatzai charts post-1950s Black internationalism as an intersecting history of black Muslims, black radicals, and the Muslim third world. In response…

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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

Kotzia Square

The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…

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Venues

Zainul Abedin

The Bengal Famine 1943–44 wrecked over three million lives across undivided India during the Second World War while its colonized subjects supported the Western war effort leading to a diversion of food…

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Historical Positions

Friedrichsplatz

Constructed in the late eighteenth century as a way to expand Kassel from the old medieval town toward the flourishing Huguenot settlement nearby, Friedrichsplatz has often been employed as an arena for…

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Venues

From Logocular Anthropotechnics to Posthuman Dispositives: Toward a Manifesto of the Postdiscursive Era

by Sotirios Bahtsetzis, with images by Christos Karakepelis

What is the future of the human, and what is the role that art has to play in determining this future? After philosophical thinking has determined the “end of man,” or as Jacques Derrida aptly put…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #9: The Forgotten Space

by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch

American artist Allan Sekula made The Forgotten Space after he was invited to create a work of art in a public space. He thought it important to understand television as such a public space and set out to make a film for national television with his co-director, the Paris-based American film theorist Noël Burch…

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Public TV

To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

by Elsa Dorlin

Pathogenic Subjectivity

Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#27 Decolonizing Memory: Vita Futurities in the Americas

by Macarena Gómez-Barris

In this talk, Gómez-Barris asks how we might decolonize memory to activate different potential alternative and anti-capitalist futures. Specifically, the talk addresses how the evacuation of colonial…

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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