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.…
Take Grand Bois (1975), with its overlap of fluid, gesticulating branches of the tree/God; or Imamou (1970s), the stature and mysterious prominence of the rooster looking on/in at the ceremony for Agoue…
First, imagine a theater with no actors. Now get rid of the stage. Then take out the walls and the chairs. What remains? The audience—a public confronted, as in a mirror, with itself, no longer able…
Modernity has its forms, its laws, its fatal fantasies.1 Extinction is their logical drift. For five hundred years, ecocide and genocide have belonged to the dynamics, the very energetics, of modernity…
Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.
This museum is housed in a former private home designed by Ernst Ziller for German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Its interior—once the height of opulence—reflects the influence of archaeological…
Four years have passed since the death of the Cuban painter and sculptor Antonio Vidal, but the story of his life is still full of riddles to be deciphered. His intellectual maturity is closely linked…
Accessed from a different entrance as the Press and Information Center in the same building, the third floor of Leder Meid, in the former apartment of the factory owners, presents a number of paintings…
by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad
Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…
Houses without Doors is a subjective, intimate chronicle of the survival of a Syrian-Armenian family in Aleppo as the civilian uprising devolved into an armed conflict between 2011 and 2014. Like many in Syria, director Avo Kaprealian felt compelled to document the extraordinary events of the uprising…
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…
Reflecting on the process of becoming a dancing body and on the paradoxes of inventing an autonomous gestural language, Alexandra Bachzetsis performs her first piece Perfect, conceived fifteen years ago…
It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…
