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.…
“There are two ways of seeing the ways of seeing the world. One is one way and the other is another. And nobody knows: ‘Is there, anywhere, one way of seeing the two?’”
—Stefan Themerson
The experience of working as an exhibition guard and art handler at documenta 2 in 1959 was fundamental to Hans Haacke’s understanding of the operative rules of the field of art. Overhearing curators’…
Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…
Along the south slope of the Acropolis lies the pedestrian street Dionysiou Areopagitou, named after Dionysius the Areopagite. Moving from east to west, the street begins alongside the Arch of Hadrian…
In 1975, Christopher D’Arcangelo (1955–1979) undertook a series of unauthorized actions in New York’s major museums. The anarchist statement that accompanied them as well as all of D’Arcangelo’s…
The Giesshaus (foundry) was built as part of the Henschelei, a factory established in the nineteenth century by the industrialist family Henschel, which specialized in the construction of locomotives…
Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamisso’sShadow —Chapter 1: Alaska and Aleutian Islands takes as its point of departure the accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso. The nineteenth-century botanist and poet was a voyager on the Romanzow research expedition, which aimed to find a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans…
I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…
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…
The arcades begin on the left and, through a foreshortened perspective, run almost to the horizon. Ten round arches can be discerned. Above nine of them are rectangular windows; a tenth, located on the…