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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

Arin Rungjang

When Arin Rungjang speaks about history, he uses a vocabulary associated with rumor and hearsay: history is neither fact nor uncontested. For Rungjang, who was born in Bangkok in 1975, the contention is…

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Artists

This Is Not the Place

by Diana Taylor

2006: Visit to Villa Grimaldi with Pedro Matta 

Pedro Matta is a survivor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. Given my work on…

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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…

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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

Kotzia Square

The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…

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Venues

Louis Kolitz

Louis Kolitz was a German genre painter active from the 1860s until his death shortly before the outbreak of the First World War; from 1879 until 1911 he was the director of the art academy, today’s…

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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

A Mighty Forest

by Dieter Roelstraete

It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #17: Chamissos Schatten, Kapitel 1: Alaska und aleutische Inseln (Chamisso’s Shadow, Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands)

by Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamissos Shadow Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands takes as its point of departure the accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso. The nineteenth-century botanist and poet was a voyager on the Romanzow research expedition, which aimed to find a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans…

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Public TV

The Mask of Language: Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik

by Quinn Latimer

“Will there be time to make myself a mask when I emerge from the shadows?” is a question Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself in “The Green Table,” a poem of fragments, queries, and laments in which…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

VOICE-O-GRAPH

by Panos Charalambous with Vassilis Charalambidis, Angelos Krallis, Panayotis Panopoulos

VOICE–O–GRAPH is a vinyl work of discovery, preservation, reuse and manipulation. A happening that manifests itself with objects of immediate urgency. Coming from either forgotten, censored, or disintegrated…

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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

Representing Misery: Courbet’s Beggar Woman

by Linda Nochlin

Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]