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

Ross Birrell

Things tend to get personal, at times: I owe my acquaintance with Ross Birrell to Gustav Metzger, whose exhibition In Memoriam, dedicated to Walter Benjamin, I organized at Kunsthalle Basel in 2006. As…

Artists

Lives and Works of Lorenza Böttner

by Paul B. Preciado

Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Word-of-Mouth: On the Early Reception of Ulises Carrión

with Magalí Arriola

Reflecting on some of the inventive and resourceful methods developed by Ulises Carrión in later life, Magalí Arriola’s presentation will revisit his practice in order to analyze the reception of his work within the burgeoning Mexican art scene of the late 1990s…

Calendar

Interview with Akinbode Akinbiyi

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

Temple of Olympian Zeus

One of the largest temples of the ancient world, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was first planned in 515 BC by Peisistratus the Young. Construction, however, stalled for more than six hundred years and only…

Venues

Allan Sekula

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Narrowcast House

Narrowcast House is an open radio studio and listening space initiated by artist Anton Kats for documenta 14’s aneducation. Located in a disused storefront in Kassel’s Nordstadt, Narrowcast House is…

Venues

So Many Hungers

by Natasha Ginwala

It is believed the spotted hyenas of Harar came to roam the city during the Ethiopian famine of 1888, surviving on organic refuse and human remains.1 Traveling through Ireland preceding the Great Hunger…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #15: Baghé Sangui (The Garden of Stones)

by Parviz Kimiavi

The Garden of Stones, by Parviz Kimiavi, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1976. Born in Tehran in 1939 and now living in Paris, Kimiavi is a cult figure in the Iranian New Wave. He studied film and photography at l'École Louis Lumière in Paris and worked in French television before returning to Iran in 1969, where he became a pioneering figure in Iran’s alternative cinema scene…

Public TV

Fourteen Poems

by Alejandra Pizarnik

South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#2

by Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri is professor of Theory of the State at the University of Padua. Negri actively collaborated in the debates and struggles of workers of the Italian radical left during the 1960s and 1970s…

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

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…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]