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.…
During a visit to Lahore in September 2015, we converged in Lala’s home; the door to her backyard garden lay open and a light breeze drifted in. I soon learned that this garden had been transformed into…
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…
When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…
This three-day seminar reexamines the fundamental relationships that wars and civil wars (among classes, races, sexes) have entertained with capital (and especially financial capital) throughout the history…
Due to its prominent location in front of the Greek Parliament, the central square of Athens has long served as the starting and ending point for many assemblies and demonstrations. Its original name was…
This drawing was made by the French realist master Gustave Courbet as a preparatory sketch for a major painting titled Alms from a Beggar at Ornans (1868), now housed in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow…
Beyond its obvious postmodern invocations, documenta Halle seems like a body reclining on the slope that brings visitors from Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie and Karlsaue park—an organism of steel and…
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…
In December 2011, ten German intellectuals met in Berlin to discuss the current political crisis: how democracy had been undermined, weakened, hollowed out, and perverted by the so-called free market and its functions…
Early in the winter of 2015, the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut quietly reopened its permanent display of Islamic art and architecture. Less a wing than a modest corner of a…
