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.…
“There are two ways of seeing the ways of seeing the world. One is one way and the other is another. And nobody knows: ‘Is there, anywhere, one way of seeing the two?’”
—Stefan Themerson
In the fifty-five years that I’ve known Jonas Mekas, I have never seen him without a camera, ready to use. First it was a 16 mm Bolex, then a series of video and digital recording devices. Today, most…
What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a…
The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…
“Inside every human being there is a light, a sun, and through it, we are able to behold an external light, the external sun,” wrote Lamakh in one of his Books of Schemes. These books construct a cosmological…
documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station)…
My father, the agronomist and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje, was born in 1886 in British colonial India, the son of a Marathi vakil, a petition writer in the courts of law, and the grandson…
Images of war pervade our screens, streaming in real time, impossible to ignore. Harun Farocki’s Serious Games reminds us that this spectacle is only one aspect of the mediatization of combat: the image does not simply picture war, but is also an instrument of warfare…
I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…
This three-day seminar reexamines the fundamental relationships that wars and civil wars (among classes, races, sexes) have entertained with capital (and especially financial capital) throughout the history…
Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…
