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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

A letter from the documenta 14 team, following the attacks in Beirut on November 12 and Paris on November 13, 2015

We arrived in Beirut last Thursday morning, November 12. On that day, two blasts hit the southern suburb of the city, leaving 43 people dead and 239 wounded. On Friday, November 13, a series of coordinated…

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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]

600 Notes
Dedicated to Sedje Hémon (1923–2011)

with Marianna Maruyama and Andrius Arutiunian

Between 1958 and 1965, the Dutch artist and composer Sedje Hémon kept a chronologically ordered (but not dated) record of 600 numbered notes tracing the development of her method of integrating visual…

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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

Polytechnion, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), Prevelakis Hall

Athens Polytechnic is among the oldest higher-education institutions of Greece. It is also a central symbolic and historical locus of contemporary Greek resistance. On November 14, 15, and 16, in 1973…

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Venues

Antonio Vidal

Four years have passed since the death of the Cuban painter and sculptor Antonio Vidal, but the story of his life is still full of riddles to be deciphered. His intellectual maturity is closely linked…

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Historical Positions

Westpavillon (Orangerie)

The Orangerie was built by Karl I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It served him as both a summer house and a winter habitat for potted trees such as citrus and palms…

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Venues

H+G

by Elizabeth Allen-Cannon, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Andrew Bearnot, Jan Brugger, Evan Carter, Kyle Hossli, Ben Nicholson, Shanna Zentner

Scene 1: Prologue

The stage is dark. Lighting is eerie and is slowly introduced as performers enter the stage. A slowed down version of the opening drum riff to Natti Vogel’s “Cannibal” plays. The…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #6: Voilà l'enchaînement

by Claire Denis

How two people come apart can be as compelling to watch as what brings them together. In Clarie Denis’ film Voilà l’enchaînement, the fissures in a relationship between a black man (Alex Descas) and a white woman (Norah Krief) are apparent from the first scene. Longing for more closeness, and caressing his shoulder, she asks him to tattoo her name on his body. He gently refuses: “for you it means eternity, for me it means branded.” Does the friction of this early exchange—still light enough to be softened with an embrace, but opening a crack of enmity—set in motion what comes next…

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Public TV

Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword*

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Rebuilding the Idea of a Global Left

with Naeem Mohaiemen, Vijay Prashad, Zonayed Saki, and Samia Zennadi

This four-evening seminar started from the desire to unpack some of the forgotten languages, broken dreams, and uncanny hopes that appear in Naeem Mohaiemen’s film for documenta 14 Kassel, Two Meetings…

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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