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.…
We arrived in Beirut last Thursday morning, November 12. On that day, two blasts hit the southern suburb of the city, leaving 43 people dead and 239 wounded. On Friday, November 13, a series of coordinated…
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…
Pedro Matta is a survivor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. Given my work on…
In this meeting the artist Ross Birrell makes a special presentation of his upcoming publication “The Parasite” (2017). Done within the research framework of documenta 14, “The Parasite” is a text…
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…
The Bengal Famine 1943–44 wrecked over three million lives across undivided India during the Second World War while its colonized subjects supported the Western war effort leading to a diversion of food…
Having opened its doors to the public in September 2015, Grimmwelt is the latest addition to Kassel’s museum landscape: perched atop the so-called Weinberg, this museum devoted to the life, work, and…
by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad
Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…
“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…
(A text which reflects on those who are absent and on biographies, narrates Durito’s first encounter with the Cat-Dog, and talks about other things that may or may not be relevant, as the impertinent…
Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile's notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance?…
In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…
