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

Yael Davids

You handed me a face shield with a steel blue head strap. “Have a glass mask,” you said. We laughed softly, aware of the obvious, not funny, allusion. I asked you if you knew that monosyllabic rhymes…

Artists

Nusja Jonë

by Yll Çitaku and Nita Deda

The Goran people of Kosovo live in Lubinje, a remote village at the foot of the Sharr Mountains. They have a tradition of dressing and making up the bride on her wedding day, covering the whole body in…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

The Parliament of Bodies: The Strategy of Joy

with Ross Birrell, Nita Deda, Hendrik Folkerts, Dimitris Ginosatis, Natasha Ginwala, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Candice Hopkins, iQhiya, Élisabeth Lebovici, Catherine Malabou, Joar Nango, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Paul B. Preciado, Ibrahim Quraishi, Roee Rosen, Dim Sampaio, and Adam Szymczyk

A paradox lies at the heart of contemporary democratic societies concerning the center of the politics of representations of their parliaments: They have gradually turned into ensembles joined by fear…

Calendar

Interview with Maria Hassabi

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

Syntagma Square

Due to its prominent location in front of the Greek Parliament, the central square of Athens has long served as the starting and ending point for many assemblies and demonstrations. Its original name was…

Venues

Antonio Vidal

Four years have passed since the death of the Cuban painter and sculptor Antonio Vidal, but the story of his life is still full of riddles to be deciphered. His intellectual maturity is closely linked…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Gottschalk-Halle (University of Kassel)

Many threads of Kassel’s history are woven together in this abandoned warehouse. Built in the 1950s on a location belonging to two of the city’s most prominent industrial dynasties, Henschel company…

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 #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

When the Dead Silently Speak Out

by Subcomandante Marcos

(Rewind 1)

(A text which reflects on those who are absent and on biographies, narrates Durito’s first encounter with the Cat-Dog, and talks about other things that may or may not be relevant, as the impertinent…

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

600 Notes
Dedicated to Sedje Hémon (1923–2011)

with Marianna Maruyama and Andrius Arutiunian

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…

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]