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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

Marta Minujín

The Parthenon was built in Athens at the instigation of Pericles, under the supervision of the sculptor Phidias, between 447 and 38 BCE. The structure is ten meters high by seventy meters long and thirty…

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Artists

A Guatemalan Idyll
Story by Jane Bowles
Paintings by Vivian Suter

When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Debt and Migration in the Postcolony. An Enquiry into Greece’s Crisis

with Ranabir Samaddar and The Apatride Society of the Political Others, Lena Platonos, Savina Yannatou, Stergios Tsirliagos and The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión

In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…

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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

Aristotle’s Lyceum

Between the Athens Conservatoire (Odeion) and the Sarogleio Building (Armed Forces Officers Club) lie the foundations of the ancient Lyceum of Aristotle, established by the philosopher in 335 BC with a…

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Venues

W. Richter

Along with the Grimm Brothers and August Spies, Gottlieb Theodor Kellner stands out as a harbinger of progressive politics in mid-nineteenth-century Hessen. Kellner was born in Kassel in 1819 where, in…

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Historical Positions

Henschel-Hallen

Since the closing of the Henschel factory during World War II—once a pivotal site in German industrialization and the development of military technology—the Henschel-Hallen today stand empty, to be…

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Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #29: Beuys

by Andres Veiel

Beuys, a film by Andres Veiel, is a thrilling portrait of one of the most controversial artists of the twentieth century…

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Public TV

#20 Transgressive Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Synaesthetics of the Polity (forthcoming, 2018); The Perils…

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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

What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge

by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín

We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]