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

Zainul Abedin (1914–1976)

The Bengali painter Zainul Abedin, who began his career as an art teacher in undivided India, was jolted out of his privileged existence by the Bengal Famine of 1943–44. At the birth of Pakistan in 1947…

Notes

Piotr Uklański

In 1711, in an essay for The Spectator, Joseph Addison defined wordplay as a “kind of false wit,” a petulant “jingle of words . . . comprehended under the general name of Punning.” The fraudulence…

Artists

Ahlam Shibli’s Occupation
Introduction by Ulrich Loock

Every single photograph of the work is permeated by the violence that the Israeli state exercises against the people of al-Khalil/Hebron, and all of the Palestinian people, in the occupied West Bank—through…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

What is a Circular Economy and How Can We Make It Possible?

with Erik Van Buuren and Otobong Nkanga

The hunt and greed for resources has shaped economic and societal models over the ages. A growing world population is affecting the way resources are being depleted, causing major societal disruption on…

Calendar

Interview with Andreas Angelidakis

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

Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA)—Pireos Street (“Nikos Kessanlis” Exhibition Hall)

Above the entrance of the Athens School of Fine Arts on Pireos Street we find the popular Greek slogan Ένας στο Χώμα χιλιάδες στον Αγώνα (One in the soil, thousands on the battlefield)…

Venues

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Before there were folktales, there were forests. Before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s publication of their famed volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) starting in 1812, the…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof)

documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station)…

Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #32: Le Président (The President)

by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

The President, by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, is a witty, poetic, and humorous take on the ugly reality of power in postcolonial Africa. States ruled by men who cling to power, craving immortality. Men like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, or Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Under their omnipotent rule, even to imagine a state after them is a crime…

Public TV

Prayer to Masks

by Léopold Sédar Senghor

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Communism will be the collective management of alienation*

with Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Dimitra Kotouza, Mattin, and Paul B. Preciado

Previous revolutionary theories thought that it was possible to live in unalienated conditions. However, the question of mediation and how we understand ourselves is being radically challenged today: technology…

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

Two Poems

by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]