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.…
In the spring of 2011, Syrians rose up against a dictatorship inherited from another era. Schoolchildren wrote “The emperor wears no clothes!” on the walls. Young people streamed into the streets and…
Douglas Gordon’s I had nowhere to go (2016) is a ninety-seven minute film/projected image installation, in which experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas is heard via voice-over reading passages from his 1991…
The collaboration between documenta 14 and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) seemed both inevitable and unlikely. But no more unlikely than documenta 14 dividing like a replicating…
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…
Originally designed in 1866 to host finds from nineteenth-century archaeological excavations, the museum’s collections—the most extensive in Greece—date from the sixth millennium BC to late antiquity…
Fritz Winter was born in Altenbögge, Westfalen in 1905. A student of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers at the Bauhaus, he was an early convert to the brand of lyrical abstraction—later…
Idyllically sited in Kassel’s Auepark, the Kunsthochschule is housed inside a marvel of late modernist architecture designed by Paul Friedrich Posenenske in the 1960s. For some time, the art school has…
It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…
Chantal Akerman, the director of No Home Movie and Golden Eighties among other classics of independent cinema, died in October 2015. Her uncompromising career culminated in the singularly radical testament of her final feature film, No Home Movie…
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…
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…
In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…