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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

The Syrian who wanted the Revolution

by Abounaddara

The Syrian who wanted the revolution is not in opposition. S/he does not belong to the system of opposition, the product of a power struggle in Assad’s Syria. S/he did not go out onto the streets to…

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Notes

Jonas Mekas

In the fifty-five years that I’ve known Jonas Mekas, I have never seen him without a camera, ready to use. First it was a 16 mm Bolex, then a series of video and digital recording devices. Today, most…

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Artists

We Are Somatic Creatures: Hila Peleg in Conversation with Rosalind Nashashibi, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Ben Russell

Few filmmakers in recent years have managed to combine formal innovation with a programmatic stance toward filmmaking quite like Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the process of reinventing…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

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…

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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

Karaiskaki Square, Piraeus

The central square at the port of Piraeus takes its name from one of the most famous leaders in the Greek War of Independence, General Georgios Karaiskakis. The square became well-known in 1922 when many…

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Venues

André du Colombier

“Since beginning to know his work a bit better, I’ve come to think that this tall, curiously blond boy perceived us by way of clues—clues capable of entering savant equations, according to linguistic…

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Historical Positions

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…

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Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #19: 48

by Susana de Sousa Dias

A face appears in Susana de Sousa Dias’ 48 — the profile of a young woman, a black-and-white photograph, taken decades ago. Her face is stern, proud, austere. Yet she weeps. She tells a tale of humiliation, frustration, and defeat. She has no name, no age, no flesh…

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Public TV

Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought

by Andreas Angelidakis

John Hejduk spent his life developing a set of characters. The stories they inhabited are the elaborate architectural drawings he called Masques, after the sixteenth-century European tradition of masked…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.

with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…

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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

I Had Nowhere to Go

by Jonas Mekas

When, in 1944, Jonas Mekas left the small village in Lithuania where he grew up, he was twenty-two years old and a man of “some reputation,” as he puts it. Editor-in-chief of a weekly paper and a young…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]