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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…

Notes

El Hadji Sy

Recall to the early 1990s and a meeting with El Hadji Sy in his studio in Dakar: I remember having difficulty photographing his paintings in isolation. Sy engineers my vision so that every shot contains…

Artists

Lives and Works of Lorenza Böttner

by Paul B. Preciado

Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

L'héroïsme des migrants

with Nicole Lappiere

Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.

Mandela Girls…

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

Stella Municipal Cinema

Located in Kypseli, a northern neighborhood of central Athens, the open-air cinema Stella sits like a blank frame set within a densely urban environment. Named after the strong-willed character played…

Venues

Maria Ender

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Leder Meid Apartment

Accessed from a different entrance as the Press and Information Center in the same building, the third floor of Leder Meid, in the former apartment of the factory owners, presents a number of paintings…

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 #32: Le Président (The President)

by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

The President, by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, is a witty, poetic, and humorous take on the ugly reality of power in postcolonial Africa. States ruled by men who cling to power, craving immortality. Men like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, or Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Under their omnipotent rule, even to imagine a state after them is a crime…

Public TV

Occupy Collections!*
Clémentine Deliss in conversation with Frédéric Keck on access, circulation, and interdisciplinary experimentation, or the urgency of remediating ethnographic collections (before it is really too late).

Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Boats of History

with Giorgos Maniatis, Servanne Jollivet, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Anna Papaeti, and Nelli Kampouri

The session of talks and debates surrounding the political history of the Mediterranean takes place on a boat sailing along the coast of Athens and the Piraeus Port. There is no better place than a boat…

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

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…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]