Menu
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.

 More
News

In Memoriam: K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016)

by Natasha Ginwala

As the days pass by
And you gain in years

The past does not keep you captive.
—K. G. Subramanyan, from “A Near Vision” (Poems: Rhymes of Recall, Seagull Books, 2014)

A visionary artist and pedagogue…

 More
Notes

Mattin

In the desire to explore noise and improvisation in social and political terms, Mattin, along with publishing books, sets up situations for the “exhibition as concert.” This took form, for example…

 More
Artists

Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence

by Sean O’Toole

Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Emancipating the Eyes of History

with Georges Didi-Huberman

Some reflections on the image as a way of “seeing time.” On necessary transgression. On the dialectics of desire and memory. On images as uprisings…

 More
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…

 More
Publications

Athens Conservatoire (Odeion)

The Athens Conservatoire, commonly referred to as Odeion, is part of an unrealized urban plan that won the architect Ioannis Despotopoulos first prize in a competition held for the Athens Cultural Center…

 More
Venues

Glass Pavilions on Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse

One of the main traffic corridors in Kassel, Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse also designates a border. Geographically, it traces the line between Mitte at the center and Nordstadt in the north of the city; as…

 More
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…

 More
South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #6: Voilà l'enchaînement

by Claire Denis

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…

 More
Public TV

Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness

by Hendrik Folkerts

To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a ­discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Biafra’s Children: A Survivors’ Gathering

Organized by Olu Oguibe, with Faith Adiele, Phillip U. Effiong, Okey Ndibe, Vivian Ogbonna, Obiageli Okigbo, E.C.Osondu, Emeka Okereke


Fifty years ago, in 1967, a bitter civil war broke out in the newly…

 More
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…

 More
Public Education

Always Struggle with the Object, Always Rewrite the World

by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Early in the winter of 2015, the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut quietly reopened its permanent display of Islamic art and architecture. Less a wing than a modest corner of a…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]