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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

In Memoriam: K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016)

by Natasha Ginwala

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)

A visionary artist and pedagogue…

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Notes

Beau Dick

Beau Dick’s name in the Kwakw’ala language means “big, great whale.” His carvings often feature Dzunuk’wa, the “wild woman of the woods,” and her counterpart, Bakwas, “wild man of the woods.”…

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Artists

Resisting Extinction: Standing Rock, Eco-Genocide, and Survival

by Gene Ray

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…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Black Athena Reloaded 2: A Trial of the Code Noir

with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès

Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…

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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

Archimidous 15

The industrial district of Moschato is characterized by workshops, tavernas, wholesale shops, and low-income housing blocks, while also hosting the Athens School of Fine Arts Pireos Street campus. Blocks…

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Venues

Maria Lai

Sardinian artist Maria Lai’s oeuvre is closely interwoven with literature and poetry, both formally and as related to content. Writer Salvatore Cambosu (1895–1962) was an important mentor and friend…

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Historical Positions

Former Underground Train Station (KulturBahnhof)

documenta 14 in Kassel might begin underground. Envisioned as the visitor’s point of entry into the exhibition, the decommissioned tunnel at the KulturBahnhof (formerly Kassel’s main rail station)…

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Venues

Revolutionary Work: Pandurang Khankhoje and Tina Modotti

by Savitri Sawhney

My father, the agronomist and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje, was born in 1886 in British colonial India, the son of a Marathi vakil, a petition writer in the courts of law, and the grandson…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #31: ​Passing Drama

by Angela Melitopoulos

Passing Drama by Angela Melitopoulos revolves around the great population displacement that followed the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. The title plays with the double meaning of the word “Drama.” Implying tragedy and turmoil, Drama is also the name of the town where Melitopoulos’s grandparents settled after the Lausanne convention in 1923…

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Public TV

Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword*

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#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

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