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
My first encounter with Vivian Suter was surreptitious: her name showed up on a documenta 14 travel email, and since I knew none of the participants and was curious about who some others might be, I put…
To introduce Korean women’s poetry in the space of five minutes would be as difficult as shrinking five thousand years into five minutes. The Korean male literary establishment differentiates and categorizes…
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…
Pavel Filonov was an art theorist, painter, and poet. Discharged from the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Art in 1910, Filonov travelled across Europe, during which time he formulated his first theoretical…
Tofufabrik was founded toward the end of the 1990s by György Debreceni and Heike Hellerung, pioneers of the “bio tofu scene” in Hessen. What started as a small, local supplier of organic bean curd…
Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…
Dimitri Venkov’s Krisis is based on a Facebook discussion on December 8, 2013, the day that “Leninopad,” the widespread demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, kicked off in Ukraine. The first monument to be dismantled in Kyiv was made by Soviet sculptor Sergei Merkurov and was erected in 1946, while Stalin was still in power. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom) claimed responsibility…
John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…
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…
