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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

John Berger: Between Permanent Red and the Black Box of the Universe

by Nikos Papastergiadis

Artist, art critic, novelist, and poet John Berger (1926–2017) died on January 2 at the age of 90. documenta 14 remembers his insights and influence…

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Notes

Negros Tou Moria

The concert hall is dark. A rebetiko song from the 1930s flows through the loudspeakers:

last night in the dark
two black men cornered me
to search me
and take the hash away
from me

As the song concludes, Negros…

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Artists

A Guatemalan Idyll
Story by Jane Bowles
Paintings by Vivian Suter

When the traveler arrived at the pension the wind was blowing hard. Before going in to have the hot soup he had been thinking about, he left his luggage inside the door and walked a few blocks in order…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#25 An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual

An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.

Note: Please bring some…

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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

Karaiskaki Square, Piraeus

The central square at the port of Piraeus takes its name from one of the most famous leaders in the Greek War of Independence, General Georgios Karaiskakis. The square became well-known in 1922 when many…

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Venues

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika

The archive of the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika contains approximately one hundred personal photographs. The selection on display was taken with a Leica camera during the artist’s travels in Greece…

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Historical Positions

Peppermint

Peppermint is a hybrid plant, one that shoots out transversal roots, growing quickly and fragrantly into various contexts. Peppermint is also the namesake of aneducation’s space for documenta 14 in Kassel—a…

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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 #6: Voilà l'enchaînement

by Claire Denis

How two people come apart can be as compelling to watch as what brings them together. In Clarie Denis’ film Voilà l’enchaînement, the fissures in a relationship between a black man (Alex Descas) and a white woman (Norah Krief) are apparent from the first scene. Longing for more closeness, and caressing his shoulder, she asks him to tattoo her name on his body. He gently refuses: “for you it means eternity, for me it means branded.” Does the friction of this early exchange—still light enough to be softened with an embrace, but opening a crack of enmity—set in motion what comes next…

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Public TV

The Mask of Language: Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik

by Quinn Latimer

“Will there be time to make myself a mask when I emerge from the shadows?” is a question Alejandra Pizarnik asks herself in “The Green Table,” a poem of fragments, queries, and laments in which…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#3

by Niillas Somby

Niillas Somby is a Sámi political-rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer. He was one of the seven hunger strikers during the Alta controversy (1982) and lost an arm during a sabotage…

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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

What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge

by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín

We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]