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.…
As the days pass by And you gain in years The past does not keep you captive. —K. G. Subramanyan, from “A Near Vision” (Poems: Rhymes of Recall, Seagull Books, 2014)
Part commune, part pedagogical experiment, and part hands-on architectural laboratory, Ciudad Abierta (Open city) was founded by a roving troupe of artists and poets—tellingly enough, hardly any “professional”…
Modernity has its forms, its laws, its fatal fantasies.1 Extinction is their logical drift. For five hundred years, ecocide and genocide have belonged to the dynamics, the very energetics, of modernity…
In the 1990s, a civil movement organized at grassroots level by students and villagers to try to reconcile the thousands of feuding families around Kosova. These blood feuds were based on an old law that…
Athens Polytechnic is among the oldest higher-education institutions of Greece. It is also a central symbolic and historical locus of contemporary Greek resistance. On November 14, 15, and 16, in 1973…
While Olu Oguibe’s project in Athens, The Biafra Time Capsule (2017), deals with an archive of the human tragedy of the Biafra War (1967–70), his work in Kassel refers to a critical humanitarianism…
Carmelo Bene’s 1971 film Don Giovanni is not an adaptation of a famous Don Juan story. Instead, the film critically investigates the multifaceted legend of the wealthy male sinner who seduces one woman after another. This is a film about Don Juanism…
Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…
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?…
To reiterate the facts about the now well known but as yet unseen Gurlitt estate: it consists of artworks and art objects amassed by the German art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956)…