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.…
Dieter Roelstraete: The story of the Gurlitt Estate has been an ongoing curatorial concern of documenta 14’s. For some time now you have sailed on an independent course of artistic research into the…
My first encounter with Joaquín Orellana Mejía was in late May 2015, in his studio in Guatemala’s National Theater, amid his sound utensils (útiles sonoros). That the Guatemalan composer and innovator…
What follows is [an excerpt of] a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure…
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…
Originally designed in 1866 to host finds from nineteenth-century archaeological excavations, the museum’s collections—the most extensive in Greece—date from the sixth millennium BC to late antiquity…
Pavel Filonov was an art theorist, painter, and poet. Discharged from the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Art in 1910, Filonov travelled across Europe, during which time he formulated his first theoretical…
Having opened its doors to the public in September 2015, Grimmwelt is the latest addition to Kassel’s museum landscape: perched atop the so-called Weinberg, this museum devoted to the life, work, and…
Carmelo Bene’s 1971 film Don Giovanni is not an adaptation of a famous Don Juan story. Instead, the film critically investigates the multifaceted legend of the wealthy male sinner who seduces one woman after another. This is a film about Don Juanism…
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)…
with Dimitris Parsanoglou, Maria Iorio, and Raphaël Cuomo
In contemporary discussions of European borders, the sea stands as a silent and invisible yet violent medium that accentuates the tragic or heroic border crossings of migrants and refugees. Although it…
The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…
