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.…
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…
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…
Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…
Between 1958 and 1965, the Dutch artist and composer Sedje Hémon kept a chronologically ordered (but not dated) record of 600 numbered notes tracing the development of her method of integrating visual…
Cecilia Vicuña completes the Athenian chapter of her documenta 14 project by way of a ritual offering to the sea gods of ancient Hellenic lore. The sacrifice in question consists of Vicuña presenting…
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…
The brutalist Neue Hauptpost, renamed the Neue Neue Galerie by documenta 14, was inaugurated in 1975 as Kassel’s main post office and mail distribution center. In the wake of the partial privatization…
Climate chaos, globalized toxicity, mass extinction. A global social process has altered the earth’s biophysical systems, destabilizing the climate and shifting the course of evolution. Ironically, knowledge…
Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is an exquisite meditation on death, dignity and voyeurism that unfurls like a baroque tapestry. Visionary Catalan filmmaker and artist Albert Serra is contemporary cinema’s master historicist…
Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…
After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, a discourse around body politics became strongly engaged in not only tackling but also actively working through the country’s painful dictatorial past…
The arcades begin on the left and, through a foreshortened perspective, run almost to the horizon. Ten round arches can be discerned. Above nine of them are rectangular windows; a tenth, located on the…
