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.…
“The thirtysomething and fortysomething generations in the Arab world (to which I belong) are the children of a generation that once believed they could change the world and reverse the order of their societies. They fought to realize their dream and were defeated. We, their offspring, have come into adulthood and consciousness of the world as their dreams and defeats have resulted in sinister schemes of despotism. All they had left to give us to face the world and guard us against the torment of its ruthlessness was their sorrow. Thus has sorrow become our skin: the skin of our cities, the skin of our voices, the skin that warms, and with which we love.”
—Rasha Salti
Although better known as a poet in her adoptive North American home (she has lived in New York since the 1980s), Cecilia Vicuña has stayed true to her youthful calling as a genre-bending visual artist…
There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary…
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…
This museum, founded in 1885, is filled with inscriptions dating from the eighth century BCE to the late Roman period—there are economic accounts, treaties, decrees, sacred laws, funerary stelae, and…
Throughout the 1930s, Irish-born mid-century literary icon Samuel Beckett was a frequent visitor to Germany, spending time in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and Kassel, home of his first true love interest…
Accessed from a different entrance as the Press and Information Center in the same building, the third floor of Leder Meid, in the former apartment of the factory owners, presents a number of paintings…
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”…
The Garden ofStones, by Parviz Kimiavi, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1976. Born in Tehran in 1939 and now living in Paris, Kimiavi is a cult figure in the Iranian New Wave. He studied film and photography at l'École Louis Lumière in Paris and worked in French television before returning to Iran in 1969, where he became a pioneering figure in Iran’s alternative cinema scene…
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…
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…
