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.…
On 25 October 2015, Polish parliamentary elections were won decisively by the Law and Justice (PiS) party. A few months earlier, in May of last year, the party’s candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential…
Hooran balances precariously on a jagged rock in Barmer, Rajasthan. Her hands are curled up like claws, and her gaze is fearsome. Mir Hasan clutches the body of his bedridden grandfather, Haji Saraj ud…
Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that took to the streets and made public…
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…
Originally designed in 1866 to host finds from nineteenth-century archaeological excavations, the museum’s collections—the most extensive in Greece—date from the sixth millennium BC to late antiquity…
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…
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…
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…
Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is an exquisite meditation on death, dignity and voyeurism that unfurls like a baroque tapestry. Visionary Catalan filmmaker and artist Albert Serra is contemporary cinema’s master historicist…
Taci, anzi parla: “Shut up. Or rather, speak,” as Italian art critic turned activist Carla Lonzi called her “Diary of a Feminist” in 1978.2 Her title indicated an imperative mood full of doubts…
The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity…
