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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

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…

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Notes

Banu Cennetoğlu

A photograph, hazy in the way old photos can be, reveals a young woman in traditional Kurdish costume, a clunky metal headdress atop her head. She doesn’t smile. In another, shoulder pads conspicuous…

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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]

Encountering: Gesture as Event, or The Conceptual Body

with Hendrik Folkerts, Amelia Jones, and Arnisa Zeqo

We warmly invite you to the inauguration of The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión. This Society takes the work and methods of Mexican artist Ulises Carrión (1941–89) as a starting point in order…

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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

Franz Boas

The German anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) is shown posing for a diorama of the Hamat’sa ceremony for the then U.S. National Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution)—a ceremony that is…

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Historical Positions

Nordstadtpark

Nordstadtpark in Kassel is full of people on any summer evening or weekend, a place of leisure for the truly multinational neighborhood, as well as for students at the University of Kassel and visitors…

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Venues

Keimena #2: Sleepless Nights Stories

by Jonas Mekas

Sleepless Nights Stories originated from my reading of the One Thousand and One Nights. While my stories, unlike the Arabian tales, are all from the real life, they too, at some points wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality…

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Public TV

Editors’ Letter

by Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk

The second issue of South as a State of Mind as the magazine of documenta 14 goes to print almost exactly one year before the inauguration of the exhibition in Athens, and fourteen months before the…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated…

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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

“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…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]