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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

Wang Bing: Retrospective

A documenta 14 film program and exhibition
June 7–September 17, Gloria-Kino, daily

documenta 14 presents a full retrospective of Wang Bing’s films with an accompanying exhibition of archival materials…

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Notes

Alvin Lucier

On one side of the stage, a performer ignites a small flame, which stands out against the darkness; on the other side, another performer appears and vocalizes a sustained tone that rises and resounds throughout…

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Artists

A Guatemalan Idyll
Story by Jane Bowles
Paintings by Vivian Suter

When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#25 An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual

An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.

Note: Please bring some…

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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

Kotzia Square

The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…

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Venues

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904–80) was a leading modernist artist and teacher at Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts) in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Besides working with drawing, wax sculptures, collage…

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Historical Positions

Museum für Sepulkralkultur

Opened in 1992, a few quiet footsteps from Grimmwelt Kassel, the Museum für Sepulkralkultur is entirely dedicated to the culture of death, from burial customs and memorial symbols to more everyday experiences…

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Venues

Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty-First Century

by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…

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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

Occupy Collections!*
Clémentine Deliss in conversation with Frédéric Keck on access, circulation, and interdisciplinary experimentation, or the urgency of remediating ethnographic collections (before it is really too late).

Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#29 Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism

by Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky…

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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

I Had Nowhere to Go

by Jonas Mekas

When, in 1944, Jonas Mekas left the small village in Lithuania where he grew up, he was twenty-two years old and a man of “some reputation,” as he puts it. Editor-in-chief of a weekly paper and a young…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]