Documenta 14 Expands Team, Details First Publication

The countdown is on! The opening of Documenta 14 is now less than two years away, and today its organizers revealed a bit more about what they have planned for their edition of the once-every-five-years exhibition in Kassel, Germany, which has expanded to Athens for this go-round.

The big news: new team members are on board. Paul B. Preciado has been hired as curator of public programs, along with Sepake Angiama as head of education, Clare Butcher and Arnisa Zeqo as education coordinators, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as curator at large (hard not to envy that title), Natasha Ginwala and Candice Hopkins as curatorial advisors, and Jill Winder as online editor. Full biographies for those eight are available on Documenta’s website.

In other news, Documenta announced that it will edit four issues of the biannual Athens-based magazine South as a State of Mind as part of its publications program. The first issue, which is South as a State of Mind’s sixth issue, drops at the end of the month. There will also be a website for the project, and related events in Athens, Kassel, Berlin, Dhaka, and Kolkata. A bit more about the initiative, from Documenta’s newsletter:

In keeping with the concept of documenta 14 as a bi-located exhibition—one in which the exclusive role of host is left behind for a more radically receptive position—and in working with existing institutions and initiatives, we are hosted in the pages of South as a State of Mind by Marina Fokidis, who founded the magazine in Athens in 2012. For the four documenta 14 editions of the journal, which will be published semiannually until the opening of the exhibition in 2017, we are guests only. We imagine the South of documenta 14—both the journal and the imagined spaces it invokes—as a place of research, critique, art, and literature paralleling the years of work on the exhibition overall, one that will help define and frame its concerns and aims. Writing and publishing, in all their forms, will be an integral part of documenta 14, and we believe that this magazine will herald that process.

Documents 14 opens in Athens on April 8, 2017, and in Kassel on June 10.