documenta 14

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.…

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…

Notes

Aboubakar Fofana

Born in Mali in 1967, Aboubakar Fofana left the African continent at an early age for Paris. Fofana’s founding discipline was calligraphy. Fascinated by the sign and the trace, he drew on Western and…

Artists

Voyage of the Sable Venus

by Robin Coste Lewis

Prologue:

What follows is [an excerpt of] a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Boats of History

with Giorgos Maniatis, Servanne Jollivet, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Anna Papaeti, and Nelli Kampouri

The session of talks and debates surrounding the political history of the Mediterranean takes place on a boat sailing along the coast of Athens and the Piraeus Port. There is no better place than a boat…

Calendar

Interview with Olu Oguibe

Public Education

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…

Publications

Dionysiou Areopagitou

Along the south slope of the Acropolis lies the pedestrian street Dionysiou Areopagitou, named after Dionysius the Areopagite. Moving from east to west, the street begins alongside the Arch of Hadrian…

Venues

Andrzej Wróblewski

In a life cut short before the age of 30, Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–57) produced an impressive body of work consisting of paintings, drawings, and prints, and spanning both abstraction and figuration…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Narrowcast House

Narrowcast House is an open radio studio and listening space initiated by artist Anton Kats for documenta 14’s aneducation. Located in a disused storefront in Kassel’s Nordstadt, Narrowcast House is…

Venues

H+G

by Elizabeth Allen-Cannon, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Andrew Bearnot, Jan Brugger, Evan Carter, Kyle Hossli, Ben Nicholson, Shanna Zentner

Scene 1: Prologue

The stage is dark. Lighting is eerie and is slowly introduced as performers enter the stage. A slowed down version of the opening drum riff to Natti Vogel’s “Cannibal” plays. The…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #34: Rak ti Khon Kaen (Cemetery of Splendour)

by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cemetery of Splendour is Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s seventh feature film. In a provincial city in Thailand’s northeast, soldiers deployed on a construction project come down with a strange sleeping sickness and receive treatment in a makeshift clinic. A friendship develops between two of their volunteer carers, who discover that the soldiers’ digging has disturbed an ancient royal cemetery said to lie beneath the clinic, and that this has caused their mysterious illness…

Public TV

Raíces / Tierra / Mazorca / Desierto / Piedra
(Roots / Earth / Corn / Desert / Stone)

by Regina José Galindo

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…

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…

Public Education

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]