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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

Listening to Matanzas

by Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…

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Notes

Rosalind Nashashibi and Nashashibi/Skaer

Rosalind Nashashibi’s films are shot at eye level. The gaze is never above, never below. Each shot is an eyelid that opens and closes. What is filmed becomes a face. Living matter, active surfaces: Nashashibi’s…

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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…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Black Athena Reloaded 2: A Trial of the Code Noir

with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès

Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…

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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

Coastline

Cecilia Vicuña completes the Athenian chapter of her documenta 14 project by way of a ritual offering to the sea gods of ancient Hellenic lore. The sacrifice in question consists of Vicuña presenting…

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Venues

August Spies

August Spies was born near Bad Hersfeld in central Hessen in 1855 and trained at the Polytechnikum in Kassel. Orphaned at age 17, he emigrated to the US, finally settling in Chicago in 1873, where he became…

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Historical Positions

Gloria-Kino

Gloria-Kino first opened its doors in 1954. Today it retains the typical architecture of its time, while the interior was renovated in the 1980s. An important venue in Kassel’s cinema landscape, the…

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Venues

Keimena #27: He Who Eats Children, Atlantis, and TRYPPS #7 (Badlands)

by Ben Russell

Ben Russell—the director of Trypps #7 (Badlands), Atlantis, and He Who Eats Children—is an itinerant filmmaker. From Vanuatu to Rhode Island, he reaffirms and interrogates the affinities between cinema and travel that have existed since the medium’s earliest years. No matter where he shoots, at stake is a reckoning with otherness—with other psychic states, other ways of living, other cultures—and with the cinema itself…

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Public TV

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Silence 1

The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-­between…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Introduction to the Society of the Indigenous

with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kampouri, and Margarita Tsomou

By establishing the notion of ithageneia (the Greek word for "indigenous") as a condition, The Apatride Society tries to go beyond a Eurocentric perspective, while encouraging the observation of the shifting…

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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