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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

In Memoriam: Ben Patterson (1934–2016)

by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

This script is not a eulogy. Actually you can't write a eulogy about someone you loved dearly, but didn't really know. This script is for, on, of, about, and with Ben Patterson and the vacuum he leaves…

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Notes

Bonita Ely

For Bonita Ely, who was born in Australia in 1946 and works in Sydney, an ecology is a system of interdependence in which different elements support and sustain each other. In harmony, an ecology is strong;…

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Artists

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

I.

It’s been nearly three years since we first embarked on the journey toward South as a State of Mind, the magazine of documenta 14, edited and produced in and out of Athens. The issue you hold, our…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

In Between
Image and Movement

with Alexandra Bachzetsis and Lenio Kaklea

Reflecting on the process of becoming a dancing body and on the paradoxes of inventing an autonomous gestural language, Alexandra Bachzetsis performs her first piece Perfect, conceived fifteen years ago…

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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

Pedion tou Areos

Named after the military exercises that took place during King Otto’s reign, the largest park in Athens was designed in 1934 to honor the heroes of the Greek Revolution (1821–32). They can be found…

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Venues

Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi

Of the many guises donned by the devil in his ultimately fruitless attempts to lead Saint Anthony the Abbot into temptation, the mound of gold is perhaps the most abstract, iconographically speaking—but…

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Historical Positions

Neue Galerie

Housing the Museumlandschaft Hessen-Kassel’s collection of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art, the Neue Galerie has been an important venue in a number of previous editions of documenta…

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Venues

Keimena #7: Manazil bela abwab (Houses Without Doors)

by Avo Kaprealian

Houses without Doors is a subjective, intimate chronicle of the survival of a Syrian-Armenian family in Aleppo as the civilian uprising devolved into an armed conflict between 2011 and 2014. Like many in Syria, director Avo Kaprealian felt compelled to document the extraordinary events of the uprising…

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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]

Black Athena Reloaded 1: Ideas as Migrants
Debt and Migration in the Postcolony. An Enquiry into Greece’s Crisis

with Ranabir Samaddar and The Apatride Society of the Political Others, Lena Platonos, Savina Yannatou, Stergios Tsirliagos and The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión

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…

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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

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]