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

“There are two ways of seeing the ways of seeing the world. One is one way and the other is another. And nobody knows: ‘Is there, anywhere, one way of seeing the two?’”
—Stefan Themerson

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…

Artists

Voyage of the Sable Venus

by Robin Coste Lewis

Prologue:

What follows is [an excerpt of] a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure…

South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Word-of-Mouth: On the Early Reception of Ulises Carrión

with Magalí Arriola

Reflecting on some of the inventive and resourceful methods developed by Ulises Carrión in later life, Magalí Arriola’s presentation will revisit his practice in order to analyze the reception of his work within the burgeoning Mexican art scene of the late 1990s…

Calendar

Interview with Cecilia Vicuña

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

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…

Venues

Tshibumba Kanda Matulu

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum

After its partial destruction during World War II, the Ottoneum performed a remarkable shift: from a theater—arguably the first theater building in Germany, constructed in the early seventeenth century—to…

Venues

Enfleshment of Memory

by Neni Panourgiá

Hunger, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith tell us, independently from each other and with completely different concerns, is a man-made condition, the result of the ecosystems of societies—society drives…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #18: Nespatřené (The Unseen)

by Miroslav Janek

“Sometimes I think I should give up, but life is for living,” says a blind boy in Miroslav Janek’s The Unseen. This award-winning documentary takes place in a school for blind children in Prague. For too long the disabled were hidden from the public eye, they were unseen. Janek’s film rectifies this by allowing the children to tell their own stories…

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…

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…

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

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…

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]