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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
„Als Ludwig I. von Bayern in seiner philhellenischen Begeisterung seinen Sohn Otto samt der bayrischen Bürokratie auf den Thron des neuen, befreiten Griechenland setzte, schiffte sich sein Minister Rudhard, ein Sohn Passaus, von seiner Heimatstadt aus direkt nach Athen ein; er trank während der Reise aus einem eigens mitgeführten Bierfaß und sang dabei bajuwarische Lieder, in denen ein Hans Jörgl hinter seiner Liesl herläuft. Die in Griechenland eingesetzte Bavarokratie sorgte in Athen sogleich für die Eröffnung einer großen Brauerei sowie von Lokalen, die — wie von Wastlhuber, der geheime Ministerial-Kanzlei-Konzipist, sagte — ,Athen in eine Vorstadt Münchens’ verwandelten.“
—Claudio Magris
Notes

Mattin

In the desire to explore noise and improvisation in social and political terms, Mattin, along with publishing books, sets up situations for the “exhibition as concert.” This took form, for example…

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Artists

Treaty and Protest: John Miller’s Photographs by Cassandra Barnett and Jon Bywater, with an introduction by Marina Fokidis

I visited photographer John Miller’s studio in 2015, on the recommendation of friends and colleagues who reside in New Zealand. I had just met with art writer Jon Bywater in Auckland, who confirmed the…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#13 Epitafios II

by Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou and MiniMaximum ImproVision

Epitafios II is a collaboration between professional actors, musicians, students, performers, and the audience. A blanket of human bodies and objects covers the floor of the former headquarters of the…

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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

Pedion tou Areos

Named after the military exercises that took place during King Otto’s reign, the largest park in Athens was designed in 1934 to honor the heroes of the Greek Revolution (1821–32). They can be found…

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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

Walking with Nandita

by Moyra Davey

New York City, 157th Street

I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger. Hunger is abstract, and…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #34: Rak ti Khon Kaen (Cemetery of Splendour)

by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cemetery of Splendour is Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s seventh feature film. In a provincial city in Thailand’s northeast, soldiers deployed on a construction project come down with a strange sleeping sickness and receive treatment in a makeshift clinic. A friendship develops between two of their volunteer carers, who discover that the soldiers’ digging has disturbed an ancient royal cemetery said to lie beneath the clinic, and that this has caused their mysterious illness…

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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]