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.…
Take Grand Bois (1975), with its overlap of fluid, gesticulating branches of the tree/God; or Imamou (1970s), the stature and mysterious prominence of the rooster looking on/in at the ceremony for Agoue…
In his Émile perverti (1974), the philosopher and Charles Fourier scholar René Schérer describes how the modern, colonial, capitalist process of extracting and seizing the subject’s libidinal power…
Modernity has its forms, its laws, its fatal fantasies.1 Extinction is their logical drift. For five hundred years, ecocide and genocide have belonged to the dynamics, the very energetics, of modernity…
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…
This significant museum features a complete depiction of an ancient Athens naval dockyard. Some of the pieces are extremely rare, in particular the famous bronze statues and a theatrical “tragedy mask”—all…
Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s scholarship, in particular his book Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art, first published in 1764), was foundational for both art history as an academic…
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…
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…
In the forty years between Inventur - Metzstrasse 11 and Logbook_Serbistan, Želimir Žilnik never ceased to give voice to the disenfranchised. Made in 1975, Inventur belongs to Žilnik's German period, when he fled Yugoslavia following the collapse of the “black wave” generation of Yugoslavian cinema of which the Serbian’ director was a key member…
I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…
with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès
Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…
The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…
