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

Mapping Drawing a Line through Landscape

by Nikhil Chopra

Notes

Nairy Baghramian

In her short story “The Iron Table” (1943), Jane Bowles describes a couple who are discussing whether or not the woman would be happy living in the desert, where the man wants to be. They seem to be…

Artists

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror

or a whisper
on bare feet

wearing only white

he slipped away

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

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 Olaf Holzapfel

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

Stoa tou Vivliou

Known as the Stoa Arsakeiou when it was built in 1900, this central yet somewhat hidden arcade took on its current name, which means “arcade of books” in 1996, when the Society for the Promotion of…

Venues

Valery Pavlovich Lamakh

“Inside every human being there is a light, a sun, and through it, we are able to behold an external light, the external sun,” wrote Lamakh in one of his Books of Schemes. These books construct a cosmological…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Glass Pavilions on Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse

One of the main traffic corridors in Kassel, Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse also designates a border. Geographically, it traces the line between Mitte at the center and Nordstadt in the north of the city; as…

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 #33: Pays Barbare (Barbaric Land)

by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

In Barbaric Land, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian ask, ‘What is fascism?’ How is it born, how is it rooted, and what unites its different strains? Composed of archival documentary material, their film descends into the darkest period of Italian history…

Public TV

Nesting the Owl

by María Magdalena Campos-Pons

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

The Apartments of Jewish Tenants as Witnesses to the Holocaust: The Paris Case

with Sarah Gensburger, Isabelle Backouche, and Eric Le Bourhis

Auschwitz, Drancy camp near Paris, the Warsaw Ghetto: the history of Jewish persecution during the Second World War is inscribed in acknowledged locations including ghettos and extermination or transit…

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

The Invisible Collection

by Stefan Zweig

Two stations after Dresden an elderly gentleman got into our compartment, passed the time of day civilly and then, looking up, expressly nodded to me as if I were an old acquaintance. At first I couldn’t…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]