Menu
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.

 More
News

In Memoriam: Beau Dick (1955–2017)

by Candice Hopkins

Beau Dick was given the name “Walis Gwy Um,” which means “big, great whale” in the Kwak’wala language. His carvings tap into the supernatural, as though everything he made is invested with spirit…

 More
Notes

Mary Zygouri

Mary Zygouri researches, reenacts, and reconfigures the politics and poetics of the archive. She positions herself in its critical fissures, conflicts, and silences, bringing forth how “minor” histories…

 More
Artists

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

I

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror 

or a whisper
on bare feet 

wearing only white

he slipped away 

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

 More
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…

 More
Publications

Trianon

Trianon Cinema opened with the premiere of the Greek film Never on Sunday in August 1960. Today, the cinema continues to screen films but has expanded its program to present performances, concerts, and…

 More
Venues

Arnold Bode

Arnold Bode is best known today as the founder of documenta and the driving force behind its first four editions (1955–64). Born in Kassel in 1900, Bode initially trained as an artist, while he was also…

 More
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…

 More
Venues

Keimena #2: Sleepless Nights Stories

by Jonas Mekas

Sleepless Nights Stories originated from my reading of the One Thousand and One Nights. While my stories, unlike the Arabian tales, are all from the real life, they too, at some points wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality…

 More
Public TV

Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness

by Hendrik Folkerts

To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a ­discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Our Common Ghosts

with Christian Nyampeta and Isaïe Nzeyimana

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…

 More
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…

 More
Public Education

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

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…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]