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.…
Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…
Mary Zygouri researches, reenacts, and reconfigures the politics and poetics of the archive. She positions herself in its critical fissures, conflicts, and silences, bringing forth how “minor” histories…
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…
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…
In 1903 Isadora Duncan and her family arrived in Athens, where they resolved to remain and establish a place for dance to be experienced in a fluid relationship with everyday living. Designed according…
Lionel Wendt (1900–44) carved an influential legacy in Sri Lanka as a photographer, concert pianist, critic, and founding member of the 43 Group, assembling modernist artistic practitioners who steered…
To many visitors to documenta, if not most, Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe Train Station, constructed to replace what is now known as the KulturBahnhof closer to the city center, affords the first glimpse and impression…
Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…
Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamisso’sShadow —Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands takes as its point of departure the accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso. The nineteenth-century botanist and poet was a voyager on the Romanzow research expedition, which aimed to find a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans…
The first documenta 14 edition of South as a State of Mind featured a roundtable discussion titled “The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate,” in which Adam Szymczyk spoke with a number of artists…
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…
