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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

Something is Rotten

by Abounaddara

Something is rotten in the state of the media. Rotten to the point that today a man accused of war crimes can summon mainstream media to announce that reality has debunked their narrative, delighting in…

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Notes

Kettly Noël

Many people will have a strong image of Kettly Noël without being able to place her. In 2014, the artist played the character of crazy Zabou in Timbuktu, the film by Abderrahmane Sissako. Zabou the voodoo…

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Artists

Lives and Works of Lorenza Böttner

by Paul B. Preciado

Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

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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

Archimidous 15

The industrial district of Moschato is characterized by workshops, tavernas, wholesale shops, and low-income housing blocks, while also hosting the Athens School of Fine Arts Pireos Street campus. Blocks…

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Venues

Lorenza Böttner

Lorenza, originally named Ernst Lorenz Böttner, was born in 1959 into a family of German origin in Punta Arenas, Chile. At the age of eight, s/he received an electric shock after climbing a pylon, as…

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Historical Positions

Neue Galerie

Housing the Museumlandschaft Hessen-Kassel’s collection of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art, the Neue Galerie has been an important venue in a number of previous editions of documenta…

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Venues

Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty-First Century

by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #27: He Who Eats Children, Atlantis, and TRYPPS #7 (Badlands)

by Ben Russell

Ben Russell—the director of Trypps #7 (Badlands), Atlantis, and He Who Eats Children—is an itinerant filmmaker. From Vanuatu to Rhode Island, he reaffirms and interrogates the affinities between cinema and travel that have existed since the medium’s earliest years. No matter where he shoots, at stake is a reckoning with otherness—with other psychic states, other ways of living, other cultures—and with the cinema itself…

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Public TV

Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought

by Andreas Angelidakis

John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Were the anxieties around immigration and globalization any different in antiquity?

with Dr. Naman P. Ahuja and Natasha Ginwala

There are fears that globalization is making different cultural identities homogeneous, yet it often enables a cosmopolitanism that enables different local practices to coexist although some differences…

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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

“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence

by Angela Dimitrakaki

It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]