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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

Listening to Matanzas

by Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…

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Notes

K. G. Subramanyan

Measuring 2.7 by 10.9 meters, The War of the Relics (2013)—K. G. Subramanyan’s final mural before his death in June 2016—is a rare and ambitious feat of the human spirit. Painted by an eighty-eight-year-old…

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Artists

For K.G. Subramanyan, or “Mani da” as we called him

by Naveen Kishore

I

Softly
like warm breath
on a cold mirror 

or a whisper
on bare feet 

wearing only white

he slipped away 

unable to resist
before escaping

a last glance

How many shawls from Kashmir can you give a man…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#17 Red Star, Crescent Moon / after Sohail Daulatzai

by Naeem Mohaiemen

In Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012), scholar Sohail Daulatzai charts post-1950s Black internationalism as an intersecting history of black Muslims, black radicals, and the Muslim third world. In response…

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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

Elpidos 13, Victoria Square

From the storefront of no. 13 on this pedestrian street, it is a short walk to Victoria Square, a low-key crossroads for people of myriad nationalities, newly settled or passing through Greece. In Spring…

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Venues

David Perlov

Filmmaker David Perlov was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930 and passed away in Tel Aviv in 2003. In 1957, he made his first short film, Old Aunt China, an animation based on sarcastic drawings and texts…

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Historical Positions

Leder Meid Apartment

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…

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Venues

Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty-First Century

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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #13: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

by Alanis Obomsawin

Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance focuses on a small Kanien'kéha:ka (Mohawk) community, unheard of by many Canadians until a protest began on March 10, 1990…

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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]

Pile o´ Sápmi

with Máret Ánne Sara and Candice Hopkins

documenta 14 curator Candice Hopkins in conversation with artist Máret Ánne Sara about her artistic work Pile o´ Sápmi, the installation of 400 reindeer skulls exhibited at Neue Neue Galerie (Neue…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]