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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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…

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Notes

Regina José Galindo

They want to hide things.
So many lies fill our eyes with dust.
—Regina José Galindo

In Regina José Galindo’s Rescue (2017), the action is heard before it is seen. Performed in Athens, Galindo’s…

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Artists

Blood Is Flowing in Carthage: Simone Weil between Force and Colonialism

by Richard Fletcher

The destruction of ancient Carthage served as the inspiration for a work by Italian artist Lara Favaretto in the inaugural (and so far only) Carthage Contemporary exhibition, titled Chkoun Ahna (meaning…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#29 Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism

by Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky…

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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

Numismatic Museum

This museum is housed in a former private home designed by Ernst Ziller for German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Its interior—once the height of opulence—reflects the influence of archaeological…

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Venues

Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi

Of the many guises donned by the devil in his ultimately fruitless attempts to lead Saint Anthony the Abbot into temptation, the mound of gold is perhaps the most abstract, iconographically speaking—but…

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Historical Positions

Glass Pavilions on Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse

One of the main traffic corridors in Kassel, Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse also designates a border. Geographically, it traces the line between Mitte at the center and Nordstadt in the north of the city; as…

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Venues

H+G: An Introduction

by Pope.L

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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #3: Oncle Bernard—L’anti-leçon d’économie

by Richard Brouillette

Depicted in Richard Brouillette’s Oncle Bernard – A Counter-Lesson in Economics, Bernard Maris, who wrote under the pseudonym of Uncle Bernard in his “Charlie Hebdo” column, had the mission of unmasking the professional fabricators of the economy—those who, every day, wherever we are, fill us with the same rubbish, draped in a phony pseudo-science whose goal is to disguise the mechanisms of that power which enslaves us…

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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]

#4 Educación cívica / Civic Education

by Sergio Zevallos

Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]