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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.

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News

David Perlov (1930–2003)

When Israeli filmmaker David Perlov died, he left behind dozens of Hefte (notebooks), filled with epigrams, texts for films, biographical notes, images interwoven with texts, and texts with images. Yet…

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Notes

Beatriz González

Beatriz González began her artistic practice in the early sixties in Bogotá, where she studied architecture and painting, as well as art history with the critic Marta Traba. In her pictorial investigations…

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Artists

Signals from Another World: Proletarian Theater as a Site for Education
Texts by Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, with an introduction by Andris Brinkmanis

What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

L'héroïsme des migrants

with Nicole Lappiere

Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.

Mandela Girls…

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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…

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Publications

First Cemetery of Athens

Under the shade of pine and cypress trees in the First Cemetery of Athens, opened in 1837, are buried some of the most prominent Greek politicians, writers, and artists. Its varied collection of mausoleums…

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Venues

Alina Szapocznikow

“As for me, I produce awkward objects. This absurd and convulsive mania proves the existence of an unknown, secret gland, necessary for life. Yes, this mania can be reduced to a single gesture, within…

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Historical Positions

Torwache

Today’s Torwache is the remnant of a palatial building plan cut short by the Napoleonic wars and invasions of the early nineteenth century. Designed by local architect Heinrich Christoph Jussow, best…

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Venues

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

Art is “not a hobby—it’s why we wake up every morning,” as artist Naeem Mohaiemen recently put it to his graduate advisers, explaining the year he took off from writing his PhD dissertation…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #8: Ku Qian (Bitter Money)

by Wang Bing

“Time is money (bastard)” sang the Swans in 1986. The same refrain—deprived of its punk rage—drives the subjects of Wang Bing’s Bitter Money. The film follows country people moving to the city to be employed as textile workers on daily or seasonal contracts…

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Public TV

Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword*

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#27 Decolonizing Memory: Vita Futurities in the Americas

by Macarena Gómez-Barris

In this talk, Gómez-Barris asks how we might decolonize memory to activate different potential alternative and anti-capitalist futures. Specifically, the talk addresses how the evacuation of colonial…

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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…

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Public Education

I Had Nowhere to Go

by Jonas Mekas

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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]