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.…
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…
Zef Shoshi (born 1939 in Tirana) is one of best-known portraitists of Albanian socialist realism. He studied painting at the “Ilya Repin” Institute of Art in St. Petersburg, bringing home a strong…
Few filmmakers in recent years have managed to combine formal innovation with a programmatic stance toward filmmaking quite like Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the process of reinventing…
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…
Internationally renowned as a stage and costume designer, Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989) also painted prolifically in a style both modernist and sensual. He was celebrated across divisions of sex, class…
On view is a small selection from over 800 watercolors, “Landschaftstheoretische Aquarelle,” made by the Swiss Renaissance man Lucius Burckhardt during his decades-long tenure as professor of sociology…
Measuring 1.5 square kilometers in total, the Auepark or Karlsaue, so named after its patron Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, is the tautly composed, arch-symmetrical Baroque counterpoint to the sprawling…
It is believed the spotted hyenas of Harar came to roam the city during the Ethiopian famine of 1888, surviving on organic refuse and human remains.1 Traveling through Ireland preceding the Great Hunger…
Carmelo Bene’s 1971 film Don Giovanni is not an adaptation of a famous Don Juan story. Instead, the film critically investigates the multifaceted legend of the wealthy male sinner who seduces one woman after another. This is a film about Don Juanism…
Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…
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…
Two stations after Dresden an elderly gentleman got into our compartment, passed the time of day civilly and then, looking up, expressly nodded to me as if I were an old acquaintance. At first I couldn’t…
