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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

An Ideal, or We Will All Die

by Abounaddara

A hideous crime was carried out in the name of God on the 13th of November in Paris. The presumed killers are French or Belgian citizens who do not identify with their national communities or with common…

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Notes

Christos Papoulias

In Greece, between heaven and earth, we are often prompted by the rocky surface of the earth’s crust, which to architect Christos Papoulias’s eyes appears, with its sinuous cracks, as an endless city—partly…

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Artists

Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence

by Sean O’Toole

Among the things I inherited from grandmother when she died were her handwritten recipes and a hardcover edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an illustrated guidebook to the region’s winged…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

#22 I Owe You Everything

by Clémentine Deliss and Chief Robert Joseph

I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual…

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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

Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Internationally renowned as a stage and costume designer, Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989) also painted prolifically in a style both modernist and sensual. He was celebrated across divisions of sex, class…

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Venues

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…

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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…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #11: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans)

by Narimane Mari

Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…

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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…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

Black Athena Reloaded 2: A Trial of the Code Noir

with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès

Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…

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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

Representing Misery: Courbet’s Beggar Woman

by Linda Nochlin

Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre (Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]