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

An Ideal, or We Will All Die

by Abounaddara

A hideous crime was carried out in the name of God on the 13th of November in Paris. The presumed killers are French or Belgian citizens who do not identify with their national communities or with common…

 More
Notes

Rick Lowe

Rick Lowe first came to Athens from Houston in late June 2015 via a philanthropic conference in Vouliagmeni, a seaside town twenty kilometers from the city center. Determined to get to know the Greek capital…

 More
Artists

They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with an introduction by Laura Preston

Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also…

 More
South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Working Group Distomo

with Argyris N. Sfountouris and Margarita Tsomou

In Greece, June 10 is the most significant day of remembrance for victims of the Nazi regime. On this day in 1944, an SS massacre took place in the village of Distomo: The entire village was burned to…

 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

Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Internationally renowned as a stage and costume designer, Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989) also painted prolifically in a style both modernist and sensual. He was celebrated across divisions of sex, class…

 More
Venues

Hessisches Landesmuseum

The Hessisches Landesmuseum, designed by the German historicist architect Theodor Fischer, was inaugurated in 1913; as such, it was among the last major historical museums opened before the onset of World…

 More
Venues

To Create the Sound of Hunger: Joaquín Orellana in Conversation with Stefan Benchoam, Julio Santos, and Alejandro Torún, with an introduction by Monika Szewczyk

The Guatemalan composer and sound artist Joaquín Orellana is among the most important living members of South America’s musical avant-garde. In a career spanning half a century, his practice has combined…

 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

To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

by Elsa Dorlin

Pathogenic Subjectivity

Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis…

 More
South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Our Common Ghosts

with Christian Nyampeta and Isaïe Nzeyimana

In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…

 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

A United Front Against the Debt

by Thomas Sankara

The case of AKP, an eighty-year-old Polish immigrant in England described by neuropsychologist Chris Moulin et al. in a 2005 paper in the journal Neuropsychologia, is one of many prominent examples of…

 More
South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]