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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

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…

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Notes

David Lamelas

I recently stumbled into the pioneering Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas on his way to a rendezvous with a friend. He was running late, but the exchange was typically intense. I’d been rereading…

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Artists

There Aren’t Enough Magazines ...

by Antonin Artaud

There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something.  We are real. This excuses us from being necessary…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#16 Lingua Tertii Imperii

by Daniel García Andújar

Democracy has become a matter of aesthetics. The stage of the public has become a kind of orchestrated video game or operetta with a few recited parts; this operetta is performed daily for a people overwhelmed…

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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

Elpidos 13, Victoria Square

From the storefront of no. 13 on this pedestrian street, it is a short walk to Victoria Square, a low-key crossroads for people of myriad nationalities, newly settled or passing through Greece. In Spring…

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Venues

Mikhail Matyushin

These fragments of a score for voice and piano are all that survived of the music composed by Mikhail Matyushin for the first futurist opera. The score favors chromatic harmonies in the piano part and…

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Historical Positions

documenta Halle

Beyond its obvious postmodern invocations, documenta Halle seems like a body reclining on the slope that brings visitors from Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie and Karlsaue park—an organism of steel and…

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Venues

Keimena #5: Verzió

by Miklós Erdély

Miklós Erdély’s Version gravitates around Tiszaeszlár, a small East Hungarian village where in 1882 a young maid went missing and was later found dead in the river. The local Jewish community was accused of ritually murdering her. The blood libel trial that followed ignited anti-Semitic propaganda, agitation, and later pogroms in Austria-Hungary that gained worldwide attention…

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Public TV

Bibliocaust

by Mustapha Benfodil

I am called BODY WRITING. Unidentified Verbose Object. ISBN: 978-1-14210-562-7. 197 pages, deletions included. 15 x 21 cm. Standard offset paper. Cover: a photograph by Mark Velasquez depicting a naked…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

How does it feel to be a problem?

This performative gathering establishes no hierarchies between radically different knowledge, languages, and practices, between activism and performance, between theory and poetry, between art and politics: collectively, we experiment with the construction of a public space of visibility and enunciation…

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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

Like a Riot: The Politics of Forgetfulness, Relearning the South, and the Island of Dr. Moreau

by Françoise Vergès

The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]