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 an era characterized by its identification with materiality, one tends to dissociate the material from its larger cultural and historical nexus and instead focus on it as commodity. The sculptures and…
The Goran people of Kosovo live in Lubinje, a remote village at the foot of the Sharr Mountains. They have a tradition of dressing and making up the bride on her wedding day, covering the whole body in…
Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile's notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance?…
Central to Athenian democracy and justice was the Agora, a place of assembly for its citizens. At the center of the Ancient Agora of Athens was the Odeion of Agrippa, an auditorium with the capacity to…
This drawing was made by the French realist master Gustave Courbet as a preparatory sketch for a major painting titled Alms from a Beggar at Ornans (1868), now housed in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow…
The Hessisches Landesmuseum, designed by the German historicist architect Theodor Fischer, was inaugurated in 1913; as such, it was among the last major historical museums opened before the onset of World…
Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan revolutionizes cinema’s documentary tradition. The film turns the cinematic gaze into an immersive experience that offers a hallucinatory, unsettling, and crude depiction of modern industrial fishery…
“Will there be time to make myself a mask when I emerge from the shadows?” is a question Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself in “The Green Table,” a poem of fragments, queries, and laments in which…
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…
