Menu
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.

 More
News

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…

 More
Notes

Sokol Beqiri

As visual reminiscences and artistic responses to the bestialities of war, the works of Sokol Beqiri from the early 2000s also speak to the omnipresence of crime in the city where he was born in 1964…

 More
Artists

A Guatemalan Idyll
Story by Jane Bowles
Paintings by Vivian Suter

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…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#29 Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism

by Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky…

 More
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…

 More
Publications

Isadora & Raymond Duncan Dance Research Center

In 1903 Isadora Duncan and her family arrived in Athens, where they resolved to remain and establish a place for dance to be experienced in a fluid relationship with everyday living. Designed according…

 More
Venues

André Pierre

Born in Haiti, André Pierre (1916–2005) lived in Croix-des-Missions at the outer edge of Port-au-Prince and developed his oeuvre as a self-trained artist and respected Vodou priest while also involved…

 More
Historical Positions

BALi-Kinos

BALi-Kinos is located in Kassel’s former central train station. In 1995 it became part of the complex developed as the KulturBahnhof, and since 1997 it has been the home of the documenta film program…

 More
Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…

 More
South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #22: Ernste Spiele I–IV (Serious Games I–IV)

by Harun Farocki

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…

 More
Public TV

Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought

by Andreas Angelidakis

John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#4 Educación cívica / Civic Education

by Sergio Zevallos

Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity…

 More
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…

 More
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)…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]