I didn’t catch Moldovan artist Pavel Brăila’s The Ship in Kassel during documenta 14. According to the description in the exhibition’s guidebook and website, The Ship: takes the form of a public bus roaming the city streets of Kassel. Appearing as though half-submerged in seawater, the bus is an appropriation of the Stultifera Navis, or […]
On August 20, 21 and 22, 2017, I posted three posts on Minus Plato about the sound piece Medea by Soundwalk Collective. Here they are to refresh your memory: The first post is just the cover of the book Medea, the second a link to the sound piece (with a video by Vincent Moon), while […]
The exhibition “Voyage around my Room” curated by Kika Kyriakakou (with production coordinator Vicky Tsirou), took place between March 18th and May 2nd this year at the Athens Municipality Arts Center in Parko Eleftherias. Conflating Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1926) and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre (1794), the […]
While waiting at the Dubai International Airport after three whirlwind days at the opening of Sharjah Biennial 14 (hereafter SB14), I found myself idly looking back over my Instagram posts from the exhibition. Even though I had taken hundreds of photographs, videos and audio recordings of my experience at the exhibition, I had only shared […]
It is official, the next Documenta, to be held in 2022, has a new Artistic Director (or directors): the Indonesian artistic collective ruangrupa. (See here for the reports from ART News, Artforum and The Art Newspaper). This exciting announcement has a transformative effect on my ongoing project to examine the legacies of documenta 14 and […]
This coming Friday, February 22nd 2019, the Artistic Director for Documenta 15 (scheduled for 2022) will be announced (for more details – in German – go here). In preparation, let us look back to November 22nd 2013, to the moment that Adam Szymczyk was appointed Artistic Director for documenta 14. You can read the official […]
A belated happy new year to all our Minus Plato readers! I have been busy putting together The Minus Plato Library as well as creating a series of teaching projects related to art and education after documenta 14 and I am now ready to share them with you all. Stretching across two courses (Art Education […]
As promised in Wednesday’s post, here is the first part of the Black Athena Reloaded session from the documenta 14 public program The Parliament of Bodies: While the second session focused on the brutal slavery document, Le code noir, this first discussion engages the theme of ‘Ideas as Migrants – Our Common Ghosts’, and is […]
How to counter racism? Sooth with a cool application of philosophical knowledge or inflame with the immediacy of emotional energy? Classicist Ellen Cole Lee’s abstract for her paper at the upcoming Theorizing Africana Receptions workshop (details here) on anger in the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca and the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde […]
How can we hold onto the tragedy of Soweto? The sacrifice of these children who carry an ideal for us? So asks Dakar-born Beninese artist Pélagie Gbaguidi in her interview for the special education issue of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) titled: “If you’re running from history, it will eventually catch up with you”. She […]