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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.

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News

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…

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Notes

Ahlam Shibli

According to what Ahlam Shibli told me, the two photographic “reportages”—I use the term here for want of space to debate it—that will be presented at documenta 14 have precedents in her work…

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Artists

Double Gambit: Katerina Koskina and Adam Szymczyk in Conversation with Domenick Ammirati

The collaboration between documenta 14 and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) seemed both inevitable and unlikely. But no more unlikely than documenta 14 dividing like a replicating…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

L'héroïsme des migrants

with Nicole Lappiere

Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.

Mandela Girls…

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Calendar
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…

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Publications

Avdi Square

In a prelude to Athenian industrialization, the silk company of Athanassios Douroutis defined the working-class neighborhood of Metaxourgeio (which means “silk factory”) and gave the central square…

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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…

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Historical Positions

Neue Galerie

Housing the Museumlandschaft Hessen-Kassel’s collection of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art, the Neue Galerie has been an important venue in a number of previous editions of documenta…

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Venues

Keimena #17: Chamissos Schatten, Kapitel 1: Alaska und aleutische Inseln (Chamisso’s Shadow, Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands)

by Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamissos Shadow Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands takes as its point of departure the accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso. The nineteenth-century botanist and poet was a voyager on the Romanzow research expedition, which aimed to find a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans…

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Public TV

Mythopoeic Acts: Mariana Castillo Deball’s Newspaper Works

by Adam Szymczyk

Mariana Castillo Deball’s contribution to this magazine is a series of contour drawings made by perforating pages from daily European newspapers. Crude, geometric, and, in their hypnotizing symmetry…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

L'héroïsme des migrants

with Nicole Lappiere

Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.

Mandela Girls…

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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…

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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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]