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.…
Every time I visit Geta Brătescu’s studio, I make the same journey. I board the train in Ploiești, the city where she was born in 1926, and alight in Bucharest, the city where she now lives and where…
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…
Although torture under the Greek military junta (1967–74) has been subject to scrutiny, with important trials in Strasbourg (1968–69) and Greece (the so-called “Torturers’ Trials,” 1975), the…
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…
Much lesser known than his folktale-gathering, dictionary-drafting brothers Jacob and Wilhelm, Ludwig Emil Grimm deserves greater recognition for his work as a draughtsman, engraver, and painter. A founding…
Similar to the Landesmuseum a couple of blocks to the south, the Stadtmuseum has had a recent rebirth. Founded in 1979 inside a typical 1870s Gründerzeit building, it reopened in 2016 after a long period…
Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…
Passing Drama by Angela Melitopoulos revolves around the great population displacement that followed the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. The title plays with the double meaning of the word “Drama.” Implying tragedy and turmoil, Drama is also the name of the town where Melitopoulos’s grandparents settled after the Lausanne convention in 1923…
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…
with Sarah Gensburger, Isabelle Backouche, and Eric Le Bourhis
Auschwitz, Drancy camp near Paris, the Warsaw Ghetto: the history of Jewish persecution during the Second World War is inscribed in acknowledged locations including ghettos and extermination or transit…
In Greek, the word κείμενο (keímeno) has a double meaning. As an adjective, keímeno describes something that has fallen or toppled over, but the ancient adjective is also the Modern Greek noun…
