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

Elegy for Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016)

by Candice Hopkins

Annie Pootoogook was from the Arctic near the North Pole. Her community is called Kinngait in Inuktitut—the language of Inuit people—and Cape Dorset in English. Annie passed away a few days ago. Police…

Notes

Pope.L

2016 was a year of wild speculations, burning insults, half-lies, and post-truth (Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year). But even before the UK referendum, with its demonized immigrant laborers, or…

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]

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

Interview with Olaf Holzapfel

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

Avdi Square

In a prelude to Athenian industrialization, the silk company of Athanassios Douroutis defined the working-class neighborhood of Metaxourgeio (which means “silk factory”) and gave the central square…

Venues

Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi

Of the many guises donned by the devil in his ultimately fruitless attempts to lead Saint Anthony the Abbot into temptation, the mound of gold is perhaps the most abstract, iconographically speaking—but…

Historical Positions

Public Radio

Friedrichsplatz

Constructed in the late eighteenth century as a way to expand Kassel from the old medieval town toward the flourishing Huguenot settlement nearby, Friedrichsplatz has often been employed as an arena for…

Venues

Lala Rukh
Introduction by Natasha Ginwala

An ink drawing entitled Hieroglyphics I: Koi ashiq kisi mehbooba se 1 (1995) unfolds Lala Rukh’s secret language, a constellation of calligraphic form, Minimalism, and symbolic writing. Borrowing her…

South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #10: Rabo de Peixe (Fish Tail)

by Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel

Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel’s film Rabo de Peixe portrays “an island within an island.” Rabo de Peixe is a fishing village, located on the island of São Miguel, which hosts the largest community of traditional fisheries in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. The re-edit of their 2003 film combines ethnographic observation and sociological investigation with a diaristic style and a nostalgic tone to portray the male members of two generations of fishermen from Rabo de Peixe and their daily lives, ambitions, and struggles…

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]

#26 The Waltz of the Dirty Streets

by Adespotes Skyles

This performance is inspired by all those people who at some point, in some place, in some way reacted to what was putting them down by posing thousands of questions. By all those who, if only for a brief…

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

Volume Eleven (A Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism)

by Naeem Mohaiemen

South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]