Witte de With,
center for contemporary art
Witte de Withstraat 50
+31 (0)10 4110144
Rotterdam
Morality leitmotiv
October 10, 2009-September 26, 2010

This ambitious program is envisioned as an invitation to think and debate on a wide range of issues that the word morality evokes. It is for this reason that in the context of this program the word morality is presented in an open way, under a paradoxical light. While there are certain moral principles that are usually unquestioned (the right to life, for instance, and the right to freedom), there is a huge world of phenomena and inter-cultural engagement in which morality remains ambivalent and amorphous. It is these amorphous areas, the grey zones, that we want to address with this project, as they form most of our reality today.

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. Morality is also a broad subject that affects everybody in many different ways. From the bathroom to the parliament, there is a total field of social engagement in which morality functions without boundaries, between a set of abstract, intangible and general ideas. Morality is neither a base nor a superstructure, but a smooth network of influences that operates outside the law, governing both regulated and unregulated social spaces, and affecting daily lives in subtle, seductive, unexpected ways. Yet, there is not a unique or purely affirmative sense that one can give to this notion. A number of moral attitudes — often at odds with one another — inform the positions that, as political subjects, we assume vis-a-vis the events that take place in our world.

Seemingly simple, but also disturbingly difficult to grasp, morality is an ideal leitmotiv for a project that seeks to explore critical points of fragmentation in everyday life.

Rather than presenting statements that can be perceived as being right or wrong, good or evil, the project Morality will create a space for showing a wide range of attitudes that problematize a total conception of morality, focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes that shape common thinking and behavior.

Act I, Beautiful from Every Point of View, Installation view, (left) Ron Terada, Voight Kampff, 2008, Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, (right) Kris Martin, Mandi VIII, 2006, Courtesy of David Roberts Art Foundation, London, Witte de With, October 2009, Photo Bob Goedewaagen.

Act I, Beautiful from Every Point of View, Sarah Morris, Beijing (film stills), 2008, 35 mm/HD, 84:47 min, Courtesy of the artist.

Witte de With,
center for contemporary art
Witte de Withstraat 50
+31 (0)10 4110144
Rotterdam
Morality Act I:
Beautiful
from Every Point of View
10 October 2009 - 10 January 2010
Morality Act II:
From Love to Legal
October 10, 2009-February 7, 2010

Morality plays out in two acts, proposed as parallel situations between interrelated statements about our relationship to the world and to images.

Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View explores the gray space that we inhabit between images and power. Act I’s title derives from Horace’s famous aphorism of the first century BCE, “nothing is beautiful from every point of view.” Not so long ago, this statement would have seemed absurd, given the Enlightenment idea that Truth and Beauty arrive together. Today, however, Horace’s sentence is little more than a platitude, increasingly deployed in a rhetoric in which any point of view, and any action, can find its justification merely in its right to exist.

Beautiful from Every Point of View is a group exhibition that brings together a selection of works that refuse to assert an immediate, self-evident point of view on the subjects they represent. The works range from poignant simulations of the capitalist sublime, to humorous commentaries on the relationship between struggle and power.

Featured artists are Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Marko Lulic, Kris Martin, Josephine Meckseper, Sarah Morris, Ron Terada, Tobias Zielony, Artur Zmijewski.

Act II: From Love to Legal reveals the different forms that the gray area that we inhabit between images and power may take.

Exploring references to biographical, anecdotal, personal and factual histories, with Act II we want to suggest a cyclical trajectory that originates in private life, in a space and a time in which, in Barthes’ words, one “is not an image, an object”. Does this mean that there is a space and a time in which we are able to remain outside the spaces of power, truth, and morality?

From Love to Legal brings together a selection of contemporary artworks that confront such oppositions between anecdotal and factual, personal and historical, making it problematic for us to separate desire from even the most ascetic relationship to the world.

Featured artists are Isa Genzken, Joachim Koester, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Isabelle Pauwels, Tobias Rehberger, Nedko Solakov, Danh Vo, Peter Wächtler, Katarina Zdjelar.

Acts I and II are curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Intervention I: Between You and I, AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio , 2009, Details (shown as print), Courtesy of AES+F and Triumph Gallery, Moscow.

Mark Boulos, All that is Solid Melts into Air (2008), Film still, Two-channel video installation, 15 minutes, Courtesy of the artist, from Act V, Power Alone.

Canan Senol, Exemplary ( 2009), Film still, Courtesy of the artist, , from Act V, Power Alone.

Adel Abidin, Foam (2007), Film still, Courtesy of the artist, from Act V, Power Alone.

Marek Sobczyk, Gandzia, 1981, painting, 90 x 90 cm, Courtesy of the artist & Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa and der Universität Bremen, from I Could Live in Africa, Morality Act IV.

Luxus, zine / mixed media, Courtesy of the artists & Pawel Jarodzki, from I Could Live in Africa, Morality Act IV.

Witte de With
Witte de Withstraat 50
+31 (0) 10 4110144
Rotterdam
I Could Live in Africa, Morality Act IV
February 20-April 25, 2010
Power Alone, Morality Act V
February 20-April 25, 2010

I Could Live in Africa is the fourth act in the year-long project Morality, organised by Witte de With.

It is the first exhibition of Morality that looks at the past and highlights the attitude of artists, choosing to be active as groups rather than individuals, with the aim of resisting an hermetic, authoritarian social and political system. The exhibition presents a variety of practices emblematic of a hidden movement that was driven by the need to open a different space from the moral and aesthetic cultural standards prevailing in Poland under and after martial law (December 13, 1981 to July 22, 1983).

Borrowing its title from Dutch filmmaker Jacques de Koning's documentary on the Polish post-punk and reggae band Izrael, I Could Live in Africa explores the mood shared by the "new wild" artists and the music subcultures (punk, new wave, reggae) in 1980s communist Poland. Determined by a gloomy political and economic context, this mood translated into an eruption of subcultures that managed to circumvent both the limited means of production and the monopoly the ruling regime over publishing and recording. These subcultures thrived against a background of police brutality, closed borders, empty shops, and frequent power shortages. Their aesthetic weapons included anti-regime stencils and graffiti, safety pins, wildly expressive and primitive forms, assemblages of waste and detritus, collages, concerts that turned into ecstatic group rituals, opening receptions that morphed into improvised happenings, and zines. Though the times were hardly "funny", these cultural manifestations were infused with humour, openly sneering at the system and contemptuous of totalitarian propaganda, the lack of democracy, the naivety of mass media, the Church, and cultural hypocrisy in general.

While the punk movement of the West was brandishing it's slogan, no future, the Polish punk artists were deeply invested in a better future.

Far from consuming a trend or criticizing from the premises of capitalism, these artists created not only a resistance to what existed but room to exist differently. Inspired by the Rasta philosophy, which pronounced the fall of Babylon, what drove these artists above all was an impulsive energy and a hunger for freedom.

Featured artists include Miroslaw Balka, Krzysztof Bednarski, Miroslaw Filonik, Wiktor Gutt & Waldemar Raniszewski, Jacques de Koning, Zbigniew Libera, Luxus, Wlodzimierz Pawlak, Jozef Robakowski, Darek Skubiel & Zdzislaw Zinczuk, Marek Sobczyk, Jerzy Truszkowski and many more, represented through archival matter.

Curated by Michal Wolinski in collaboration with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Anne-Claire Schmitz.

Power Alone is Act V of the year-long program Morality at Witte de With.

This group exhibition starts from the premise that power operates and is made tangible in the encounter between the general (society, morality, history, gender) and the particular (the individual). Power, as we understand it today, is the moment in which the individual experiences the process of becoming a subject, a member of her or his society through encounters with others and with the law. As power is something that is experienced, it has no aesthetic value in the traditional sense; it is, however, integral to what Jacques Ranciere calls "the distribution of the sensible". This is one way in which this exhibition engages with the notion of power.

But Power Alone also proposes a more fictive narrative, linked to the myth of Narcissus, a myth that perhaps represents the desire inherent in the discourses on power. Like Narcissus, the Greek hero renowned for his beauty and for his cruelty towards those who love him, the abstract notion we call power would be condemned to become infatuated with itself, perishing by love with its own semblance. Taking Narcissus as the personification of power, this exhibition presents a series of hypothetical scenarios on power's withdrawal from class, gender, race and its inscription in two opposing forms: the individuated body and the mythological world. The works included engage with the cleft between power as a general force and solitude as a state of mind, between power as the name we give to structures that regulate our everyday lives, and individuated encounters with these structures. The exhibition presents a number of different guises and forms of power, from concrete to abstract, in the socially conditioned world, as in Canan Senol's Exemplary or Mark Boulos' All that is Solid Melts into Air. Works such as Goshka Macuga's On The Nature of the Beast tease power relations out of specific situations; whilst Miki Kratsman's photographs, Ziad Antar's videos, or Luc Tuymans' paintings indicate spaces that can no longer be experienced outside of the structures of power.

Featured artists include Adel Abidin; Ziad Antar; Mark Boulos; Piero Golia; Jaebum Kim; Miki Kratsman; Erik van Lieshout; Goshka Macuga; Randa Mirza; Willem de Rooij; Canan Senol; Andreas Slominski; Corin Sworn; Ron Terada and Luc Tuymans.

The exhibition is curated by Juan A. Gaitan and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Amira Gad.

Goshka Macuga, On The Nature of the Beast (2009), Woven textiles, 290 x 560 cm, Courtesy Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), from Act V, Power Alone.