Documenta 14*
Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Factory and River from ‘Fields of Sight’, 2014
1. Gauri Gill’s photographs in northern India overlaid with Adivasi artist Rajesh Vangad’s Warli drawings. Systems of life and living on the land.
Gill: ‘As though one were photographing an old home, and the resident of the house came out, and began to speak.’
2. Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral, a docu-film on the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting, a project for a self-defined ‘Third World’, united along axes of decolonialism, liberation theology, and socialism.
3. The tone of Edi Hila’s paintings of deserted totalitarian architectures in Tirana, Albania, as though covered in a light mist.
4. The cracks and pools of light between shade in Amar Kanwar’s Such a Morning: ‘It was magic for free and you could watch it for hours’ (eclipsed sun through blurred leaves, clouds across sky).
5. The interaction between Navajo weaving and labour, and micro-chip design, via the work of Marilou Schultz, alongside archival material of the occupation of Fairchild Industries’ micro-chip plant on a reservation in New Mexico. But no direct testimony from the Navajos themselves.
Laurie White: ‘Although the role of Indigenous peoples in the early history of American computer manufacturing is little recorded, the strategy of outsourcing electronics manufacture to women of colour in Asia was in fact piloted within US borders on the Navajo reservation.’
6. The Serbian marching band coming over the lip of their mine in Ben Russell’s comparative film study on global mineral extraction, Good Luck, representing miners at a state-run copper mine in Serbia and a DIY gold mine in Suriname.
Lala Rukh, Hieroglyphics I: Koi ashiq kisi mehbooba se 1, 1995
7. The notational calligraphy and screen-prints of Pakistani artist, Lala Rukh. Rukh developed a style of script rooted in Hindustani musical scores, as well as the graphic identity of the Women’s Action Forum, a platform for feminisms of the Global South.
Natasha Ginwala on the potential of radical minimalism: ‘When terror is bound-up with the accelerated circulation of images, and a desensitizing iconophilia, perhaps this mode of subtraction can offer an imaginative tool to shape an appeal for civility and justice.’
8. Moyra Davey’s abécédaire of photographic ‘mailers’, sent to the home addresses of the Documenta curators and displayed in an ex-mail distribution centre.
9. Also in the Brutalist post office, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Kunstpostbriefe (art letters) and ‘Typewritings’ made during her work in East German bureaucracy (1970–80). Lists related to art-making and lists of lived complaints: SICK-ROOM HEADACHE NEUROTICS OVERTAXES / BALSAM EXPECTATION PATIENCE HESITATION
10. Otobong Nkanga’s collective process of producing charcoal soap, Carved to Flow, with olive, coconut, sage, laurel, from the Med, the Middle East and Africa.
Maya Touta: ‘It forms within it a map of untraceable lubrication channels: roads of edible substances, industries created around fuel and transportation, networks of sustenance and rejuvenation of the body.’
11. Mounira Al Solh’s recipe for nutritious Za’tar Man’ouché with sumac and sesame from Izmir, pistachios from Aleppo, Levantine herbs and German flour. The story of a bombed bakery in Syria, and a thin man asking, in real life, for spare change.
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Wait, ~1970
12. Ink and photo documentation by Chittaprosad, Zainul Abedin and Sunil Janah of the Bengali famine, caused by British colonial policy during WW2, which ruined three million lives. Chittaprosad’s illustrated pamphlet Hungry Bengal was burned by the British authorities, though the distribution of Janah’s photographs beyond India helped counter imperial censorship and augment aid.
13. A series of drawings, ‘Deportations’ (1940), of the dissolution of a human form into what could be archipelagos or puddles by Władysław Strzemiński.
14. Many pages of South as a State of Mind, including Gene Ray’s Critical Theory in the Endgame, Bhanu Kapil’s deletions, and the life story of Asja Lācis.
*Kassel-side.
After 13 impressions of Documenta 13, 2012.















