Summer 2013 Program at Witte de With
Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
The Netherlands
www.wdw.nl
Twitter / Facebook / Newsletter
The World Turned Inside Out
25 May–18 August 2013 (and onwards)
May 25, 12–3pm: Aslı Çavuşoğlu on Lapis-Lazuli and Ancient Blue
June 13, 7–9pm: Landings by Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl with Rana Hamadeh on Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging and Extra-territoriality
June 20, 7–9pm: Ho Tzu Nyen on Mystical Tigers and Southeast Asian Communist Legacy
June 27, 7–9pm: Julieta Aranda‘s Exercises on Desire and ‘Exotic Matter’
July 11, 7–9pm: Jennifer Wen Ma on the Garden of Eden via Chinese Opera
July 25, 7–9pm: Shezad Dawood on Parallel Universes
August 1, 7–9pm: Kader Attia on the Construction of Evil
Off-site (in Denmark): July 13: Deirdre M. Donoghue on Maternal Thinker
Could secularized narratives and the impasse of modern rationalism be producing a world devoid of wonder? But consider that knowledge never draws straight lines…
Drafting from unexpected maps and novel courses of knowledge to reactivate pre-modern anchors, Witte de With enables the development of knowledge in collaboration with a set of international protagonists who, by linking and delinking across fields and practices, seek to debunk historical narratives guided by traditional educational models. These investigations set in motion new paths of inquiry respectively, replete with desire, curiosity, and speculation.
Julieta Aranda takes as a starting point her recent boat trip in the sprawling port of Rotterdam on a quest for the ‘exotic matter,’ while also taking a close-up look at the image of the apple as a symbolic object—both as a forbidden fruit and as the symbol of Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. Ho Tzu Nyen follows the millenary cosmo-ecological path of the mythical Malayan tiger that haunts Southeastern colonial and subsequent communist histories. Similarly stretching time and geographies, curators Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl take mangrove roots as a source of inspiration to pursue their investigation of rurality and alienness in conversation with Rana Hamadeh and works by Roberto Chabet, Bonita Ely, Irene Kopelman, Tejal Shah, Lawrence Weiner, and Terue Yamauchi, amongst others. Jennifer Wen Ma contemplates the various occurrences of the Garden of Eden, from Western medieval paintings to Chinese and Middle-Eastern mythologies, inviting a Kunqu opera singer to voice projections of lost paradises. As a black mirror, Kader Attia observes the construction of evil through the unfolding of the colonial gaze in the pages of early twentieth-century printed matter. Riffing on science-fiction and anthropological concepts of indigenousness, non-linear time, and the politics of language, Shezad Dawood embarks on fictional journeys towards a ‘possible film’ that stages encounters with the mystical. Aslı Çavuşoğlu drifts into the depths of lapis lazuli’s ancient blue, bridging Witte de With with the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan in search of delirium, absentness, and the intangibility of the sky. In parallel, an ancient site in Denmark will become the initiatory theatre for the launch of new lines of inquiry by Deirdre M. Donoghue—who reflects on the maternal figure as a thinker and a producer of knowledge, rather than a domestic figure inseparable from human emotions.
Spatial Design by Studio Miessen
Find out more about the events and to sign up, please click here.
Speculative Art Histories Symposium
2–4 May 2013
A three-day international research symposium bringing together renowned philosophers and art historians at Witte de With, Rotterdam and Erasmus University, Rotterdam
With keynote speakers Reza Negarestani, Bertrand Prévost (University of Bordeaux), Elisabeth von Samsonow (Akademie Bildende Künste Wien), Lars Spuybroek (NOX, Georgia Tech), and Kerstin Thomas (University of Mainz)
With participants Armen Avanessian, Joost de Bloois, Erik Bordeleau, Fleur Courtois-l’Heureux, Rick Dolphijn, Adi Efal, Bram Ieven, Vlad Ionescu, Sarah Kolb, Charlotte de Mille, Henk Oosterling, Andrej Radman, Sjoerd van Tuinen, and Kamini Vellodi
Program:
2 May: ‘Speculative philosophy and art‘
3 May: ‘Diagrammatics and the radical picturesque and Speculative conceptions‘
4 May: ‘Speculative presences and Speculative expressions‘
For more information on the symposium, please click here.
WdW Review
Building on its long history of framing and instigating critical exchange, Witte de With presents WdW Review, an online platform aimed at informing our ever-expanding spheres of action in an age of constant aesthetic, geographic, economic, communal, ecological, and spiritual reformations. Through the establishment of several editorial desks—in Athens (Yanis Varoufakis and vitalspace.org), Beijing (Ou Ning), Cairo (Yasmine El Rashidi), Istanbul (Erden Kosova), Jerusalem (Lara Khaldi), Moscow (Ekaterina Degot), Jerusalem (Lara Khaldi), and others to come—complemented by sections dedicated to debate, image analysis, and speculative essays, this undertaking seeks to foster a new collegium of knowledge partners in a purpose-built infrastructure so as to address how the world is being shaped today as a consequence, or in spite of national, international, and other group ideologies. Our call for such an exchange comes at a time in which policies of economic austerity are pressuring the very resources (magazines, universities, public institutions, and so forth) that could propose alternatives to the threat of social bottlenecking.
Editors: Defne Ayas, Adam Kleinman
Design: Remco van Bladel
WdW Review launches on May 25 and will grow on a weekly basis over a period of three years. Please visit www.wdwreview.org.
Ongoing:
Moderation(s) by Heman Chong
Moderation(s) kicked off on April 19–20 with A Thing At A Time, presenting performances by Benjamin Seror, Mette Edvardsen, Anthony Marcellini, Eszter Salamon, and Koki Tanaka, a journey to 1970s downtown New York with RoseLee Goldberg, and written insights by Guy Mannes-Abbott. From April 2013 onwards, Christina Li takes up the role of a designated Witness to Moderation(s), and in June 2013 renowned novelist Oscar van den Boogaard will embark on A Fictional Residency at Spring in Hong Kong. For more information about Moderation(s), please click here.
The Humans by Alexandre Singh
After a nine-month residency (April 2012–January 2013) in Witte de With’s exhibition spaces, researching toward the production of his major theatrical play, Alexandre Singh’s on-going exploration has continued over the course of this year and will premiere at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg on Saturday 28 September 2013. For more information on The Humans, please click here.
For more information, please contact us via info [at] wdw.nl.
For press requests, please contact us via press [at] wdw.nl.
