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.…
Agim Çavdarbasha’s sculptural work is part of the foundations of modern art in Kosovo. He studied at Yugolslav art academies (in Belgrade 1964–69 and Ljubljana 1970–71) within liberal circumstances…
I recently stumbled into the pioneering Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas on his way to a rendezvous with a friend. He was running late, but the exchange was typically intense. I’d been rereading…
What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a…
Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile's notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance?…
One of the largest temples of the ancient world, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was first planned in 515 BC by Peisistratus the Young. Construction, however, stalled for more than six hundred years and only…
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…
I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger. Hunger is abstract, and…
“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…
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…
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…
Édouard Glissant’s seminal treatise Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of Relation) was published in 2008,2 at a time when the so-called nouveaux philosophes were taking sides in the debate about…