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.…
Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…
Measuring 2.7 by 10.9 meters, The War of the Relics (2013)—K. G. Subramanyan’s final mural before his death in June 2016—is a rare and ambitious feat of the human spirit. Painted by an eighty-eight-year-old…
BO (recently extinct) Andaman Islands, India Speaker: Boa Sr, the last speaker of Bo (1925–2010) Recorded by: Anvita Abbi, 2005–10 Source: Harmeet Shah Singh, CNN
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…
The Benaki Museum was founded in 1930 by the collector Antonis Benakis. Born into an important family of the Greek diaspora, Benakis’s father, Emmanouil Benakis, was a Greek merchant and politician who…
Having opened its doors to the public in September 2015, Grimmwelt is the latest addition to Kassel’s museum landscape: perched atop the so-called Weinberg, this museum devoted to the life, work, and…
The Guatemalan composer and sound artist Joaquín Orellana is among the most important living members of South America’s musical avant-garde. In a career spanning half a century, his practice has combined…
Cemetery of Splendour is Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s seventh feature film. In a provincial city in Thailand’s northeast, soldiers deployed on a construction project come down with a strange sleeping sickness and receive treatment in a makeshift clinic. A friendship develops between two of their volunteer carers, who discover that the soldiers’ digging has disturbed an ancient royal cemetery said to lie beneath the clinic, and that this has caused their mysterious illness…
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…
The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity…
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…
