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.…
Beau Dick was given the name “Walis Gwy Um,” which means “big, great whale” in the Kwak’wala language. His carvings tap into the supernatural, as though everything he made is invested with spirit…
There is something called the “hidden curriculum,” a term developed by educational theorists in the 1920s. If it were not so hidden, I could explain exactly what it is, but it always seems to conceal…
After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, a discourse around body politics became strongly engaged in not only tackling but also actively working through the country’s painful dictatorial past…
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the revolution that created modern Greece in 1821, the Greek peninsula was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Housed in a restored neoclassical villa, the…
At documenta 14 in Athens, Douglas Gordon chose the open-air movie theater Stella for the presentation of I had nowhere to go (2016), his cinematic portrait of the avant-garde filmer Jonas Mekas, thus…
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…
American artist Allan Sekula made The Forgotten Space after he was invited to create a work of art in a public space. He thought it important to understand television as such a public space and set out to make a film for national television with his co-director, the Paris-based American film theorist Noël Burch…
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…
The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…
