Menu
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.

 More
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…

 More
Notes

Moyra Davey

Dear MD,

I was watching your new film on my laptop just now, about Chantal Akerman (about your son) [00:25], when something you said in your opening voice-over caught me: “I call this type of filming…

 More
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…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Were the anxieties around immigration and globalization any different in antiquity?

with Dr. Naman P. Ahuja and Natasha Ginwala

There are fears that globalization is making different cultural identities homogeneous, yet it often enables a cosmopolitanism that enables different local practices to coexist although some differences…

 More
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…

 More
Publications

Athens Conservatoire (Odeion)

The Athens Conservatoire, commonly referred to as Odeion, is part of an unrealized urban plan that won the architect Ioannis Despotopoulos first prize in a competition held for the Athens Cultural Center…

 More
Venues

Peppermint

Peppermint is a hybrid plant, one that shoots out transversal roots, growing quickly and fragrantly into various contexts. Peppermint is also the namesake of aneducation’s space for documenta 14 in Kassel—a…

 More
Venues

Enfleshment of Memory

by Neni Panourgiá

Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…

 More
South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #23: Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare)

by Kidlat Tahimik

Perfumed Nightmare is directed by the self-taught filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, who also plays the lead role. It tells the story of a humble, small-town lad who drives a “jeepney,” one of the trucks left behind by the US military that are still the main form of public transportation in the Philippines…

 More
Public TV

Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U’mista and Nuyumbalees. Kwak’wala words. Names bestowed on two new cultural centers in Alert Bay, British Columbia, founded to house masks and dance regalia repatriated after the potlatch ban (1885–1951)…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

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…

 More
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…

 More
Public Education

What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge

by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín

We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]