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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: Beau Dick (1955–2017)

by Candice Hopkins

Beau Dick was given the name “Walis Gwy Um,” which means “big, great whale” in the Kwak’wala language. His carvings tap into the supernatural, as though everything he made is invested with spirit…

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Notes

Sergio Zevallos

In his Émile perverti (1974), the philosopher and Charles Fourier scholar René Schérer describes how the modern, colonial, capitalist process of extracting and seizing the subject’s libidinal power…

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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]

#15 Chronotopes / Dystopic Geometries / Terrifying Geographies

by Νeni Panourgia

Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…

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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

Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA)—Pireos Street (“Nikos Kessanlis” Exhibition Hall)

Above the entrance of the Athens School of Fine Arts on Pireos Street we find the popular Greek slogan Ένας στο Χώμα χιλιάδες στον Αγώνα (One in the soil, thousands on the battlefield)…

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Venues

Stadtmuseum Kassel

Similar to the Landesmuseum a couple of blocks to the south, the Stadtmuseum has had a recent rebirth. Founded in 1979 inside a typical 1870s Gründerzeit building, it reopened in 2016 after a long period…

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Venues

A Mighty Forest

by Dieter Roelstraete

It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #6: Voilà l'enchaînement

by Claire Denis

How two people come apart can be as compelling to watch as what brings them together. In Clarie Denis’ film Voilà l’enchaînement, the fissures in a relationship between a black man (Alex Descas) and a white woman (Norah Krief) are apparent from the first scene. Longing for more closeness, and caressing his shoulder, she asks him to tattoo her name on his body. He gently refuses: “for you it means eternity, for me it means branded.” Does the friction of this early exchange—still light enough to be softened with an embrace, but opening a crack of enmity—set in motion what comes next…

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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]

600 Notes
Dedicated to Sedje Hémon (1923–2011)

with Marianna Maruyama and Andrius Arutiunian

Between 1958 and 1965, the Dutch artist and composer Sedje Hémon kept a chronologically ordered (but not dated) record of 600 numbered notes tracing the development of her method of integrating visual…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]