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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

Drawing a Line through Landscape: The Tent

by Nikhil Chopra

When seen from a distance, there is a constant glow within the tent as if it has a warm light switched on. In the day, the drawing is backlit and at night, when the oil lamps burn inside, it lights up…

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Notes

Georgia Sagri

With majestic buildings as arteries and tree-lined boulevards, Omonoia Square begins life on paper as the heart of Bavarian rule. What happened to the foundation stone laid there in honor of King Otto?…

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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]

Gordon Hookey: Summoning Time. Painting & Politikill Transition in MURRILAND!

with Gordon Hookey, Johannes Fabian, Ali Moraly, Vivian Ziherl, and Hendrik Folkerts

Taking the work of Gordon Hookey in Kassel and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu in Athens as a point of departure, this public conversation between Hookey, Frontier Imaginaries curator Vivian Ziherl, and anthropologist…

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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

Kotzia Square

The square situated in front of the City Hall of Athens has changed names many times throughout the turbulent history of the Greek state, settling on its current iteration that pays tribute to the Greek…

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Venues

August Spies

August Spies was born near Bad Hersfeld in central Hessen in 1855 and trained at the Polytechnikum in Kassel. Orphaned at age 17, he emigrated to the US, finally settling in Chicago in 1873, where he became…

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Historical Positions

Torwache

Today’s Torwache is the remnant of a palatial building plan cut short by the Napoleonic wars and invasions of the early nineteenth century. Designed by local architect Heinrich Christoph Jussow, best…

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Venues

Writing the Ecocide-Genocide Knot: Indigenous Knowledge and Critical Theory in the Endgame

by Gene Ray

Climate chaos, globalized toxicity, mass extinction. A global social process has altered the earth’s biophysical systems, destabilizing the climate and shifting the course of evolution. Ironically, knowledge…

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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

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The second issue of South as a State of Mind as the magazine of documenta 14 goes to print almost exactly one year before the inauguration of the exhibition in Athens, and fourteen months before the…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Communism will be the collective management of alienation*

with Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Dimitra Kotouza, Mattin, and Paul B. Preciado

Previous revolutionary theories thought that it was possible to live in unalienated conditions. However, the question of mediation and how we understand ourselves is being radically challenged today: technology…

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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

The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt

by Aristide Antonas

 

In Greek, the word κείμενο (keímeno) has a double meaning. As an adjective, keímeno describes something that has fallen or toppled over, but the ancient adjective is also the Modern Greek noun…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]