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 makeshift refugee camp in Calais, in the vicinity of the French port and hulking concrete bunkers, was known as the Jungle. According to different estimates, it gave shelter to nine or ten thousand…
Rise early enough and the day begins in darkness. In the films, videos, and installations of Amar Kanwar, darkness is prevalent but never absolute. In A Season Outside (1997), a meditation on the sources…
Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…
Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity…
Due to its prominent location in front of the Greek Parliament, the central square of Athens has long served as the starting and ending point for many assemblies and demonstrations. Its original name was…
Along with the Grimm Brothers and August Spies, Gottlieb Theodor Kellner stands out as a harbinger of progressive politics in mid-nineteenth-century Hessen. Kellner was born in Kassel in 1819 where, in…
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…
For the past five winters, I have taught a course at the University of Chicago that consists of readings, screenings, discussion, and analysis of the work of the Brothers Grimm and their collecting and…
CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf describes a journey on the high seas. A group of sailors from the Kutch district in western India—along with fellow seafarers from southern Iran and the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Balochistan—transport goods and livestock in wooden vessels across the Persian and Aden gulfs…
The first documenta 14 edition of South as a State of Mind featured a roundtable discussion titled “The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate,” in which Adam Szymczyk spoke with a number of artists…
The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity…
by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…
