documenta 14

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.…

News

We Are Dying—Take Care of the Right to the Image

by Abounaddara

In the spring of 2011, Syrians rose up against a dictatorship inherited from another era. Schoolchildren wrote “The emperor wears no clothes!” on the walls. Young people streamed into the streets and…

Notes

Amar Kanwar

Rise early enough and the day begins in darkness. In the films, videos, and installations of Amar Kanwar, darkness is prevalent but never absolute. In A Season Outside (1997), a meditation on the sources…

Artists

Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence

by Sean O’Toole

Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

The Fabric of Capitalism

with Click Ngwere and Denise Ferreira da Silva

The Apatride Society invites feminist activist and artist Click Ngwere and scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva to reflect and work on the fabric of contemporary capitalism. Together they look into the global…

Calendar

Interview with Katalin Ladik

Public Education

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…

Publications

Avdi Square

In a prelude to Athenian industrialization, the silk company of Athanassios Douroutis defined the working-class neighborhood of Metaxourgeio (which means “silk factory”) and gave the central square…

Venues

Alexander Kalderach

Very little is known about Alexander Kalderach, who was born in Hamburg in 1880 and died in Bern in 1965. The acme of his painting career was in the 1940s, when his work was included in the Grosse Deutsche…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

documenta Halle

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…

Venues

Windless Path

by Synnøve Persen

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #23: Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare)

by Kidlat Tahimik

Perfumed Nightmare is directed by the self-taught filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, who also plays the lead role. It tells the story of a humble, small-town lad who drives a “jeepney,” one of the trucks left behind by the US military that are still the main form of public transportation in the Philippines…

Public TV

Prayer to Masks

by Léopold Sédar Senghor

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#4 Educación cívica / Civic Education

by Sergio Zevallos

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…

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…

Public Education

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]