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.…
“The thirtysomething and fortysomething generations in the Arab world (to which I belong) are the children of a generation that once believed they could change the world and reverse the order of their societies. They fought to realize their dream and were defeated. We, their offspring, have come into adulthood and consciousness of the world as their dreams and defeats have resulted in sinister schemes of despotism. All they had left to give us to face the world and guard us against the torment of its ruthlessness was their sorrow. Thus has sorrow become our skin: the skin of our cities, the skin of our voices, the skin that warms, and with which we love.”
—Rasha Salti
There is something called the “hidden curriculum,” a term developed by educational theorists in the 1920s. If it were not so hidden, I could explain exactly what it is, but it always seems to conceal…
Few filmmakers in recent years have managed to combine formal innovation with a programmatic stance toward filmmaking quite like Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the process of reinventing…
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…
Known as the Stoa Arsakeiou when it was built in 1900, this central yet somewhat hidden arcade took on its current name, which means “arcade of books” in 1996, when the Society for the Promotion of…
The exhibition at the Fridericianum marks the first time the collection of Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) is presented in Germany, through a double displacement that renders EMST’s…
My father, the agronomist and political revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje, was born in 1886 in British colonial India, the son of a Marathi vakil, a petition writer in the courts of law, and the grandson…
Directed by the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako and set in the capital of Mali, Bamako examines the links between global economic policies and everyday life. It follows a singer and her unemployed husband. In the yard of the house they share with other families, a court is in session. On trial are the global institutions accused of impoverishing Africa…
Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…
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…
