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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

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…

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Notes

Postcommodity

Sound is weaponized. During World War II, fighter jets flew low to simulate the dropping of bombs, keeping citizens on edge. In Guantanamo Bay, metal music was blasted at intolerable levels in the belief…

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Artists

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

It’s been nearly three years since we first embarked on the journey toward South as a State of Mind, the magazine of documenta 14, edited and produced in and out of Athens. The issue you hold, our…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

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…

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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

Polytechniou 8

"A spring morning in the early 1950s, an excited group of young graduates crossed Patision avenue down to their favorite cafe on Polytechniou street. The wars were over, the sun was out, Athens was in…

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Venues

Lorenza Böttner

Lorenza, originally named Ernst Lorenz Böttner, was born in 1959 into a family of German origin in Punta Arenas, Chile. At the age of eight, s/he received an electric shock after climbing a pylon, as…

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Historical Positions

Westpavillon (Orangerie)

The Orangerie was built by Karl I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It served him as both a summer house and a winter habitat for potted trees such as citrus and palms…

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Venues

Keimena #27: He Who Eats Children, Atlantis, and TRYPPS #7 (Badlands)

by Ben Russell

Ben Russell—the director of Trypps #7 (Badlands), Atlantis, and He Who Eats Children—is an itinerant filmmaker. From Vanuatu to Rhode Island, he reaffirms and interrogates the affinities between cinema and travel that have existed since the medium’s earliest years. No matter where he shoots, at stake is a reckoning with otherness—with other psychic states, other ways of living, other cultures—and with the cinema itself…

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Public TV

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Silence 1

The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-­between…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#5 Freedom as Market Value. Freedom as Practice of Resistance

by Judith Revel

What does it mean to be free when the market exceedingly places the demand on individuals to be free, creative, autonomous, and striving? What is the difference between what Foucault, since the end of…

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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

The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate:
Adam Szymczyk in conversation with Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, and Hans Haacke

To reiterate the facts about the now well known but as yet unseen Gurlitt estate: it consists of artworks and art objects amassed by the German art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956)…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]