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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

Agim Çavdarbasha (1944­–1999)

Agim Çavdarbasha’s sculptural work is part of the foundations of modern art in Kosovo. He studied at Yugolslav art academies (in Belgrade 1964­–69 and Ljubljana 1970–71) within liberal circumstances…

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Notes

Miriam Cahn

Niggling questions

Is Miriam Cahn, born in Basel in 1949, a realist artist? What can be seen in her drawings, performances, films, and paintings—and what cannot? Where does the difference lie between…

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Artists

They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with an introduction by Laura Preston

Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

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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

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…

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Venues

Museum für Sepulkralkultur

Opened in 1992, a few quiet footsteps from Grimmwelt Kassel, the Museum für Sepulkralkultur is entirely dedicated to the culture of death, from burial customs and memorial symbols to more everyday experiences…

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Venues

To Create the Sound of Hunger: Joaquín Orellana in Conversation with Stefan Benchoam, Julio Santos, and Alejandro Torún, with an introduction by Monika Szewczyk

The Guatemalan composer and sound artist Joaquín Orellana is among the most important living members of South America’s musical avant-garde. In a career spanning half a century, his practice has combined…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #3: Oncle Bernard—L’anti-leçon d’économie

by Richard Brouillette

Depicted in Richard Brouillette’s Oncle Bernard – A Counter-Lesson in Economics, Bernard Maris, who wrote under the pseudonym of Uncle Bernard in his “Charlie Hebdo” column, had the mission of unmasking the professional fabricators of the economy—those who, every day, wherever we are, fill us with the same rubbish, draped in a phony pseudo-science whose goal is to disguise the mechanisms of that power which enslaves us…

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Public TV

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Silence 1

The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-­between…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Working Group Distomo

with Argyris N. Sfountouris and Margarita Tsomou

In Greece, June 10 is the most significant day of remembrance for victims of the Nazi regime. On this day in 1944, an SS massacre took place in the village of Distomo: The entire village was burned to…

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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

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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]