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

In Memoriam: K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016)

by Natasha Ginwala

As the days pass by
And you gain in years
The past does not keep you captive.
—K. G. Subramanyan, from “A Near Vision” (Poems: Rhymes of Recall, Seagull Books, 2014)

A visionary artist and pedagogue…

Notes

R. H. Quaytman

What can abstract painting do today? Can it revive modernism’s emancipatory aspirations or materialize its radical potential in new contexts? Can it make evident abstraction’s “blind spots” or…

Artists

Three Poems

by Kim Hyesoon

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Working Group Distomo

with Argyris N. Sfountouris and Margarita Tsomou

In Greece, June 10 is the most significant day of remembrance for victims of the Nazi regime. On this day in 1944, an SS massacre took place in the village of Distomo: The entire village was burned to…

Calendar

Interview with Emeka Ogboh

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

Elpidos 13, Victoria Square

From the storefront of no. 13 on this pedestrian street, it is a short walk to Victoria Square, a low-key crossroads for people of myriad nationalities, newly settled or passing through Greece. In Spring…

Venues

David Perlov

Filmmaker David Perlov was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930 and passed away in Tel Aviv in 2003. In 1957, he made his first short film, Old Aunt China, an animation based on sarcastic drawings and texts…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

CineStar

At documenta 14 in Athens, Douglas Gordon chose the open-air movie theater Stella for the presentation of I had nowhere to go (2016), his cinematic portrait of the avant-garde filmer Jonas Mekas, thus…

Venues

Language Is Migrant

by Cecilia Vicuña

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #14: Elias Petropoulos: Enas kosmos ypogeios (Elias Petropoulos: An Underground World)

by Kalliopi Legaki

Elias Petropoulos, who died in 2003, was the first Greek folklore researcher, author, and historian to document underground cultures and figures shunned by official history. A restless, inquisitive spirit, he was the enemy of academicism and the establishment…

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…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

No One is Illegal

with Martin Rapp, Rex Osa, and Ralf Homann

Twenty years ago, the No One is Illegal campaign was established as a decentralized network of anti-racist, migrant, and refugee-solidarity groups within documenta X’s Hybrid Workspace. Since then, it…

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]