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.…
Beau Dick was given the name “Walis Gwy Um,” which means “big, great whale” in the Kwak’wala language. His carvings tap into the supernatural, as though everything he made is invested with spirit…
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…
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…
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…
This house, which belonged to the modernist artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, is a typical example of interwar Athenian architecture. The mansion was a meeting point for the Athenian intelligentsia of…
A painter, illustrator, and children’s books author, Tom Seidmann-Freud was born into a Jewish, bourgeois family living in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. She was named Martha-Gertrud Freud. Her mother…
Today’s Torwache is the remnant of a palatial building plan cut short by the Napoleonic wars and invasions of the early nineteenth century. Designed by local architect Heinrich Christoph Jussow, best…
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…
Omar Belkacemi’s The Wave tells the story of Algerian journalist and writer Redouane, who comes back from Europe to investigate a wave of suicides in his native country during the mass lay-offs of the late 1990s…
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…
In this meeting the artist Ross Birrell makes a special presentation of his upcoming publication “The Parasite” (2017). Done within the research framework of documenta 14, “The Parasite” is a text…
Édouard Glissant’s seminal treatise Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of Relation) was published in 2008,2 at a time when the so-called nouveaux philosophes were taking sides in the debate about…
