documenta 14

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.…

News

Dignity has never been photographed

by Abounaddara

Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth…

Notes

Ahlam Shibli

According to what Ahlam Shibli told me, the two photographic “reportages”—I use the term here for want of space to debate it—that will be presented at documenta 14 have precedents in her work…

Artists

A Guatemalan Idyll
Story by Jane Bowles
Paintings by Vivian Suter

When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

Calendar

Interview with Pélagie Gbaguidi

Public Education

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…

Publications

Isadora & Raymond Duncan Dance Research Center

In 1903 Isadora Duncan and her family arrived in Athens, where they resolved to remain and establish a place for dance to be experienced in a fluid relationship with everyday living. Designed according…

Venues

Lionel Wendt

Lionel Wendt (1900–44) carved an influential legacy in Sri Lanka as a photographer, concert pianist, critic, and founding member of the 43 Group, assembling modernist artistic practitioners who steered…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

documenta Halle

Beyond its obvious postmodern invocations, documenta Halle seems like a body reclining on the slope that brings visitors from Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie and Karlsaue park—an organism of steel and…

Venues

Writing the Ecocide-Genocide Knot: Indigenous Knowledge and Critical Theory in the Endgame

by Gene Ray

Climate chaos, globalized toxicity, mass extinction. A global social process has altered the earth’s biophysical systems, destabilizing the climate and shifting the course of evolution. Ironically, knowledge…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #15: Baghé Sangui (The Garden of Stones)

by Parviz Kimiavi

The Garden of Stones, by Parviz Kimiavi, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1976. Born in Tehran in 1939 and now living in Paris, Kimiavi is a cult figure in the Iranian New Wave. He studied film and photography at l'École Louis Lumière in Paris and worked in French television before returning to Iran in 1969, where he became a pioneering figure in Iran’s alternative cinema scene…

Public TV