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.…
The makeshift refugee camp in Calais, in the vicinity of the French port and hulking concrete bunkers, was known as the Jungle. According to different estimates, it gave shelter to nine or ten thousand…
When documenta was founded and first organized in the West German city of Kassel in 1955, a proverbial stone’s throw away from the border separating West from East, “capitalism” from “communism,”…
with Naeem Mohaiemen, Vijay Prashad, Zonayed Saki, and Samia Zennadi
This four-evening seminar started from the desire to unpack some of the forgotten languages, broken dreams, and uncanny hopes that appear in Naeem Mohaiemen’s film for documenta 14 Kassel, Two Meetings…
The central square at the port of Piraeus takes its name from one of the most famous leaders in the Greek War of Independence, General Georgios Karaiskakis. The square became well-known in 1922 when many…
Many threads of Kassel’s history are woven together in this abandoned warehouse. Built in the 1950s on a location belonging to two of the city’s most prominent industrial dynasties, Henschel company…
For the past five winters, I have taught a course at the University of Chicago that consists of readings, screenings, discussion, and analysis of the work of the Brothers Grimm and their collecting and…
Gym Lumbera’s Ának Araw begins with words on the screen: a procession of basic English nouns accompanied by pictographic representations. These are followed by their live-action representations, subtitled in Tagalog. Words, but no dialogue…
Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.
In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…