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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

The Transit of Hermes

by Ross Birrell

The Athens-Kassel Ride—a mobile, participatory, human-equine ensemble performed over 100 days—is a 3000 km equestrian long ride across Europe linking the two cities of documenta 14…

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Notes

Olaf Holzapfel

As an artist born in a country that no longer exists, and whose coming-of-age involved crossing a border between the East-West divide of the Cold War era that is fast becoming a distant memory, Olaf Holzapfel…

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Artists

Lives and Works of Lorenza Böttner

by Paul B. Preciado

Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Indigenous Knowledge 1: On Violent Waters. A Discussion on Borders and Migration

with Dimitris Parsanoglou, Maria Iorio, and Raphaël Cuomo

In contemporary discussions of European borders, the sea stands as a silent and invisible yet violent medium that accentuates the tragic or heroic border crossings of migrants and refugees. Although it…

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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

Romantso

Romantso translates to “novel.” It was also the title of the popular Greek magazine that featured novel-length stories in each of its issues. It first launched in 1934; when, in 1956, its price dropped…

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Venues

Sunil Janah

The Bengal Famine 1943–44 wrecked over three million lives across undivided India during the Second World War while its colonized subjects supported the Western war effort leading to a diversion of food…

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Historical Positions

Stadtmuseum Kassel

Similar to the Landesmuseum a couple of blocks to the south, the Stadtmuseum has had a recent rebirth. Founded in 1979 inside a typical 1870s Gründerzeit building, it reopened in 2016 after a long period…

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Venues

How to Write Painting: A Conversation about History Painting, Language, and Colonialism with Gordon Hookey, Hendrik Folkerts, and Vivian Ziherl

The entwined edifice of history, the archive, and the written word have long been the subject of critique within Western theory. However, what might yet be learned from turning our attention to traditions…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #16: Angriff auf die Demokratie – Eine Intervention (Democracy Under AttackAn Intervention)

by Romuald Karmakar

In December 2011, ten German intellectuals met in Berlin to discuss the current political crisis: how democracy had been undermined, weakened, hollowed out, and perverted by the so-called free market and its functions…

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Public TV

Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U’mista and Nuyumbalees. Kwak’wala words. Names bestowed on two new cultural centers in Alert Bay, British Columbia, founded to house masks and dance regalia repatriated after the potlatch ban (1885–1951)…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

The Apartments of Jewish Tenants as Witnesses to the Holocaust: The Paris Case

with Sarah Gensburger, Isabelle Backouche, and Eric Le Bourhis

Auschwitz, Drancy camp near Paris, the Warsaw Ghetto: the history of Jewish persecution during the Second World War is inscribed in acknowledged locations including ghettos and extermination or transit…

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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]