documenta 14

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.…

News

Elegy for Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016)

by Candice Hopkins

Annie Pootoogook was from the Arctic near the North Pole. Her community is called Kinngait in Inuktitut—the language of Inuit people—and Cape Dorset in English. Annie passed away a few days ago. Police…

Notes

Eva Stefani

In “What Men Live By” (1885), the piercing, humane gaze of Leo Tolstoy raises three questions: What is inside men? What is it that is not granted to men? What is it that keeps men alive? The short…

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…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#15 Chronotopes / Dystopic Geometries / Terrifying Geographies

by Νeni Panourgia

Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…

Calendar

Interview with Regina José Galindo

Public Education

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…

Publications

Rizari Park

Near the Athens War Museum, a green oasis of exclusively Mediterranean flora is situated between two busy avenues. The plants were bequeathed in 1844 by Georgios Rizaris, a former member of the Society…

Venues

Cornelia Gurlitt

Cornelia Gurlitt was the daughter of the well-known Dresden art historian Cornelius Gurlitt Sr. and the sister of Hildebrand Gurlitt. A talented graphic artist and draughtswoman well-versed in the angular…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum

After its partial destruction during World War II, the Ottoneum performed a remarkable shift: from a theater—arguably the first theater building in Germany, constructed in the early seventeenth century—to…

Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

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…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #21: Bamako

by Abderrahmane Sissako

Directed by the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako and set in the capital of Mali, Bamako examines the links between global economic policies and everyday life. It follows a singer and her unemployed husband. In the yard of the house they share with other families, a court is in session. On trial are the global institutions accused of impoverishing Africa…

Public TV

Fair Trade Heads: A Conversation on Repatriation and Indigenous Peoples with Maria Thereza Alves, Candice Hopkins, and Jolene Rickard

The first documenta 14 edition of South as a State of Mind featured a roundtable discussion titled “The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate,” in which Adam Szymczyk spoke with a number of artists…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Oracle Drawings

with Karen Finley, Adonis Volanakis, Chrysanne Stathacos, and Sozita Goudouna

“Oracle drawings” is a project initiated and curated by Sozita Goudouna and Paul B. Preciado. It consists of a collaborative staging of a public participatory installation by Karen Finley and Adonis…

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…

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…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]