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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

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

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…

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Notes

Mary Zygouri

Mary Zygouri researches, reenacts, and reconfigures the politics and poetics of the archive. She positions herself in its critical fissures, conflicts, and silences, bringing forth how “minor” histories…

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Artists

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

I

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror 

or a whisper
on bare feet 

wearing only white

he slipped away 

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Our Common Ghosts

with Christian Nyampeta and Isaïe Nzeyimana

In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…

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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

Gennadius Library

In 1922, diplomat and bibliophile Joannes Gennadius offered his 26,000-volume library to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, on the conditions that the holdings be housed as a separate…

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Venues

Anna “Asja” Lācis

1891–1938
Born in Ķempji, Latvia in 1891; moves to Riga in 1898. Studies at Vladimir Bekhterev's Institute of Psychoneurological Research in St. Petersburg (1912–13), Šanjavskij Cultural University…

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Historical Positions

Karlsaue Park

Measuring 1.5 square kilometers in total, the Auepark or Karlsaue, so named after its patron Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, is the tautly composed, arch-symmetrical Baroque counterpoint to the sprawling…

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Venues

Keimena #13: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

by Alanis Obomsawin

Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance focuses on a small Kanien'kéha:ka (Mohawk) community, unheard of by many Canadians until a protest began on March 10, 1990…

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Public TV

To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

by Elsa Dorlin

Pathogenic Subjectivity

Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.

with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…

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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

Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation

by Manthia Diawara

Édouard Glissant’s seminal treatise Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of Relation) was published in 2008,2 at a time when the so-called nouveaux philosophes were taking sides in the debate about…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]