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.…
On 25 October 2015, Polish parliamentary elections were won decisively by the Law and Justice (PiS) party. A few months earlier, in May of last year, the party’s candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential…
Anna Halprin’s dance deck was built in collaboration with Lawrence, her husband, the landscape architect, urban designer, and ecologist, between 1953 and 1954, in the redwood area of Kentfield, California…
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…
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…
Measuring 1.5 square kilometers in total, the Auepark or Karlsaue, so named after its patron Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, is the tautly composed, arch-symmetrical Baroque counterpoint to the sprawling…
For the past five winters, I have taught a course at the University of Chicago that consists of readings, screenings, discussion, and analysis of the work of the Brothers Grimm and their collecting and…
How two people come apart can be as compelling to watch as what brings them together. In Clarie Denis’ film Voilà l’enchaînement, the fissures in a relationship between a black man (Alex Descas) and a white woman (Norah Krief) are apparent from the first scene. Longing for more closeness, and caressing his shoulder, she asks him to tattoo her name on his body. He gently refuses: “for you it means eternity, for me it means branded.” Does the friction of this early exchange—still light enough to be softened with an embrace, but opening a crack of enmity—set in motion what comes next…
U’mista and Nuyumbalees. Kwak’wala words. Names bestowed on two new cultural centers in Alert Bay, British Columbia, founded to house masks and dance regalia repatriated after the potlatch ban (1885–1951)…
The first issue of South as a State of Mind in its new, temporary role as the magazine of documenta 14 arrives more than a year and a half before the exhibition is scheduled to open, in Athens in April…