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.…
The Syrian who wanted the revolution is not in opposition. S/he does not belong to the system of opposition, the product of a power struggle in Assad’s Syria. S/he did not go out onto the streets to…
Pavel Brăila’s return to documenta 14, having shown his film Shoes for Europe (2000) at documenta 11, marks the coming-of-age of a complex art practice. Freeing itself from medium specificity, his work…
I visited photographer John Miller’s studio in 2015, on the recommendation of friends and colleagues who reside in New Zealand. I had just met with art writer Jon Bywater in Auckland, who confirmed the…
U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…
In 1922, diplomat and bibliophile Joannes Gennadius offered his 26,000-volume library to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, on the conditions that the holdings be housed as a separate…
Having opened its doors to the public in September 2015, Grimmwelt is the latest addition to Kassel’s museum landscape: perched atop the so-called Weinberg, this museum devoted to the life, work, and…
My father, the agronomist and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje, was born in 1886 in British colonial India, the son of a Marathi vakil, a petition writer in the courts of law, and the grandson…
“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…
with Natasha Ginwala, Kyrillos Sarris, and Cecilia Vicuña
Guests open up current forms and strategies of artistic self-determination beyond, behind, or within institutions. The program brings together fans and scholars alike across space and time, for discussions…
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…
