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.…
In the spring of 2011, Syrians rose up against a dictatorship inherited from another era. Schoolchildren wrote “The emperor wears no clothes!” on the walls. Young people streamed into the streets and…
The peculiar nature of the modern state, with its complex and delicate functions, and the gravity of the political, economic, and social problems which it is called upon to solve, make it the barometric…
Pedro Matta is a survivor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. Given my work on…
Twenty years ago, the No One is Illegal campaign was established as a decentralized network of anti-racist, migrant, and refugee-solidarity groups within documenta X’s Hybrid Workspace. Since then, it…
The Benaki Museum was founded in 1930 by the collector Antonis Benakis. Born into an important family of the Greek diaspora, Benakis’s father, Emmanouil Benakis, was a Greek merchant and politician who…
The Ballhaus—Leo von Klenze’s first authored building—stands next to the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, the neoclassical palace of Kassel, inside the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. It was built in 1808 by Jérôme…
The entwined edifice of history, the archive, and the written word have long been the subject of critique within Western theory. However, what might yet be learned from turning our attention to traditions…
Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance focuses on a small Kanien'kéha:ka (Mohawk) community, unheard of by many Canadians until a protest began on March 10, 1990…
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…
When, in 1944, Jonas Mekas left the small village in Lithuania where he grew up, he was twenty-two years old and a man of “some reputation,” as he puts it. Editor-in-chief of a weekly paper and a young…
