Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure was published on occasion of the exhibition Cecilia Vicuña. Seehearing the Enlightened Failure (February 8 to August 2, 2020) muac, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. unam, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City; (May 26 to November 24, 2019) Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. This retrospective exhibition brings together over a hundred works by the poet, visual artist, and activist Cecilia Vicuña. Since the 1960s, the artist has constituted a radical perspective on the relationship between art and politics through her writing and art making. She has done so in different parts ...

This publication accompanies the exhibition The End of Money (22 May – 7 August 2011), curated by Juan A. Gaitán, assisted by Amira Gad, at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, The Netherlands). The book includes a number of contributions that extend the exhibition proper beyond its self-contained existence in the gallery space. In this respect, it is also a vehicle through which the exhibition can find different discursive grounds for exploring the theme of the end of money, both as a literary and as an iconographic motif. Beyond the aforementioned essays by Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, and ...

This group exhibition brings together artworks and objects to trace various transformations of meaning, reception, and use over time. The titular metaphor of the whale’s belly—a mythic space separated from lived reality—plays on the residual legacy of the white cube as an allegedly bracketed space of reflection, contemplation and perceptual or political transformation. Just as Jonah, who in the biblical account was swallowed by a whale, and perhaps the visitor, are transformed through isolated meditation, In the Belly of the Whale plays content against its framing to question both how an artifact references a given historical moment and how different modes ...

Accompanying the exhibition Making is Thinking (23 January – 1 May 2011) Witte de With presents its first digital publication. To highlight the importance placed on process by Making is Thinking, the book was developed over the course of the show. Thinking along with the exhibition, it was made available online in installments. The publication can now be downloaded for free in its entirety. It features a historical perspective on craft by Alice Motard; a short story by Yoshiko Nagai, inspired by Teppei Kaneuji’s animation Tower; a conversation between artist Ane Hjort Guttu and Solveig Øvstebø titled The Emancipation of Forms; an ...

Morality is an invitation to reflect and debate situations in contemporary life that refuse clear distinctions between right and wrong, what is and what ought to be. As a whole, this project has been defined by a desire – inherent to contemporary art – to open spaces for active, engaged forms of spectatorship that are not predetermined by either moral or ideological imperatives. Morality is a provocative theme, especially in a world that is now determined by the experiences of war, displacement, political and economic crises, the rise of religious stereotypes, and the radicalization of seemingly old doctrines and ideologies. ...