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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

John Berger: Between Permanent Red and the Black Box of the Universe

by Nikos Papastergiadis

Artist, art critic, novelist, and poet John Berger (1926–2017) died on January 2 at the age of 90. documenta 14 remembers his insights and influence…

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Notes

Romuald Karmakar

Filmmaker Romuald Karmakar draws on the traditions of those who shaped the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. His films exist within an expanded spectrum of subgenres spanning experimental documentary…

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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]

#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
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

Temple of Olympian Zeus

One of the largest temples of the ancient world, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was first planned in 515 BC by Peisistratus the Young. Construction, however, stalled for more than six hundred years and only…

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Venues

Zainul Abedin

The Bengal Famine 1943–44 wrecked over three million lives across undivided India during the Second World War while its colonized subjects supported the Western war effort leading to a diversion of food…

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Historical Positions

Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost)

The brutalist Neue Hauptpost, renamed the Neue Neue Galerie by documenta 14, was inaugurated in 1975 as Kassel’s main post office and mail distribution center. In the wake of the partial privatization…

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Venues

So Many Hungers

by Natasha Ginwala

It is believed the spotted hyenas of Harar came to roam the city during the Ethiopian famine of 1888, surviving on organic refuse and human remains.1 Traveling through Ireland preceding the Great Hunger…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #25: Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016) was conceived and produced by the Karrabing Film Collective, an extended family whose Indigenous lands stretch across the western coast of Australia’s Northern Territory…

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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]

#6 Memory under Construction: Towards a Public Memory of Torture in Greece

by Kostis Kornetis

After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, a discourse around body politics became strongly engaged in not only tackling but also actively working through the country’s painful dictatorial past…

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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]