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

Aboubakar Fofana

Born in Mali in 1967, Aboubakar Fofana left the African continent at an early age for Paris. Fofana’s founding discipline was calligraphy. Fascinated by the sign and the trace, he drew on Western and…

Artists

We Are Somatic Creatures: Hila Peleg in Conversation with Rosalind Nashashibi, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Ben Russell

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…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#19 Attempt. Come.

by Georgia Sagri

Attempt.
Come.
Undefined.
Be the point of no-reference.
Constant,
and as a state of formation.
Play.
Continue to play with the beat.
Vibrate with me, so chaos can enter.
It is an invitation.
Come.
As water.
As the…

Calendar

Interview with Olu Oguibe

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

Ancient Agora of Athens—Odeion of Agrippa

Central to Athenian democracy and justice was the Agora, a place of assembly for its citizens. At the center of the Ancient Agora of Athens was the Odeion of Agrippa, an auditorium with the capacity to…

Venues

Yves Laloy

Yves Laloy’s paintings defy categorization. André Breton was the first to call his work surrealist, a label that Laloy felt overly limiting. Yet, Laloy embraced another relationship also put forward…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Karlsaue Park

Measuring 1.5 square kilometers in total, the Auepark or Karlsaue, so named after its patron Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, is the tautly composed, arch-symmetrical Baroque counterpoint to the sprawling…

Venues

Negative Moment: Political Geology in the Twenty-First Century

by Nabil Ahmed, with images by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

Peter Sloterdijk famously wrote that modernity began on the northern fronts of World War I, when imperial Germany first deployed poisonous chemicals, which they dug into their trenches, against French…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #12: Krisis

by Dimitri Venkov

Dimitri Venkov’s Krisis is based on a Facebook discussion on December 8, 2013, the day that “Leninopad,” the widespread demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, kicked off in Ukraine. The first monument to be dismantled in Kyiv was made by Soviet sculptor Sergei Merkurov and was erected in 1946, while Stalin was still in power. The Ukrainian ultra-nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom) claimed responsibility…

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…

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…

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…

Public Education

“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence

by Angela Dimitrakaki

It has been suggested that we live in “momentous times”1—times, that is, of profound significance for the living history of humanity. I borrow this definition from a homonymous curatorial project…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]