documenta 14

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.…

News

Meanwhile, Aboubakar Fofana contributes a text-ile to The documenta 14 Reader

by Monika Szewczyk

It took artist Aboubakar Fofana one day to set up a fructose-based indigo vat at the Mentis Center for the preservation of traditional textile techniques at 6 Polyfimou Street in Athens. It was December…

Notes

Cecilia Vicuña

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…

Artists

A Reading That Loves
The Distance between V and W
Objects in Diaspora

by Yael Davids

I begin with—
Our tiny house in the kibbutz. A narrow wooden door with a small window above it, separating the kitchen from the toilet.

On the day when this small window was broken, my father lifted…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#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…

Calendar

Interview with Narimane Mari

Public Education

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…

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…

Venues

KSYME-CMRC

The Contemporary Music Research Center (KSYME-CMRC) was founded in Athens in 1979 by Iannis Xenakis, Giannis G. Papaioannou, and Stephanos Vassiliadis, with the aim of developing electro-acoustic music…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Ballhaus

The Ballhaus—Leo von Klenze’s first authored building—stands next to the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, the neoclassical palace of Kassel, inside the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. It was built in 1808 by Jérôme…

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…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #18: Nespatřené (The Unseen)

by Miroslav Janek

“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…

Public TV

To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

by Elsa Dorlin

Pathogenic Subjectivity

Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.

with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…

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…

Public Education

“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence

by Angela Dimitrakaki

It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]