Bøger udgivet af Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art

Published at the end of curator Defne Ayas' six-year directorship of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, this richly illustrated publication celebrates the institution's programs and collaborations while ruminating on their realization.

Following Volume I (2013-2016), this anthology documents reflections published in 2016 and 2017 on WdW Review, the online platform for the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, bringing together the website's four sections: Desks, Think, Image and Sediments.

This artist's book brings together research, material fragments, chronologies, images and texts that have informed the Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire's (born 1973) work process. Baudelaire engages histories of images, cinema, radical militancy and violence by or against the state.

What kind of a reader does an artist make? This publication marks the conclusion of Para Fictions, a two-year commissioning series in which ten artists -Dineo Seshee Bopape, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Mark Geffriaud, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Laure Prouvost, Oscar Santillan, Lucy Skaer, and Rayyane Tabet- responded to works of literary fiction. Deploying strategies of allusion, vandalism, mistranslation and appropriation, the participating artists approached texts by writers such as Bessie Head, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Virginia Woolf. In the publication, invited writers and curators respond to each work, completing a circle between text and object, to trace the lines of literary affiliation and tease the productive tensions that arise between a source material and its reinscription.

Its title derived from the French word causer, meaning to chat or talk informally, Alexandre Singh: Causeries details a series of encounters between artist Alexandre Singh (born 1980) and various academics, writers, scientists and philosophers. In preparation for his ambitious play The Humans at Witte de With, Singh set up a public discussion series exploring the key themes and concerns of his developing play, such as dance, drama and religion (to name just a few). Aiming at an alternative form of public conversation, more relaxed than what is allowed at a symposium or conference, Singh engaged the invited speakers in deliberately informal conversations on such wide-ranging topics as Woody Allen, Hindu cosmogony, Aristophanes, South Park and scatology. This volume contains an edited selection of 29 of the public conversations conducted by Singh as part of the Causeries series.

In late 1911, Piet Mondrian was about to move to Paris and leave his native country of the Netherlands behind. During this period of artistic and personal transformation he turned to theosophist Adriaan van de Vijsel for an astrological reading. Mondrian was born under the sign of Pisces on 7 March 1872, and according to his horoscope was "very susceptible and [had] psychic tendencies." He was "able to feel things without being able to give an explanation of how this knowledge was obtained, [with] a mind that can express itself diplomatically, calmly, and systematically." Character Is Fate: Piet Mondrian's Horoscope, an artist's book by Willem de Rooij (born 1969), contains the facsimile, its transcription and its English translation alongside texts by Wietse Coppes and Kocku von Stuckrad.

This publication accompanies the long-term program Moderation(s) (2012--14), hosted by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

This Source Book combines critical essays and visual notes compiled by the Canadian-born, Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist, over the course of a collaboration with composer and musician George van Dam and a TV script written by Christine Lang and Christoph Dreher.

Taking off from Saadane Afif's 2008 Witte de With exhibition "Technical Specifications," this volume examines the artist's practice in relation to music. In addition to tracing the evolution and reconfigurations of the works in the show, it includes documentation of Afif's radio show, "53: 56"--which broadcast related words and songs.

Under Fire 2 is the second collection edited by Jordan Crandall in an ongoing project that explores the organization and representation of armed conflict. Emerging from online dialogues among a group of artists, theorists, scientists, critics, activists and journalists during three months of 2004 and reorganized thematically, the discussions in Under Fire 2 aim to offer new insights into symptomatic violence. The book covers issues such as the privatization of the military and the contributions of commercial and independent news media, as well as representations from artistic, literary and popular entertainment sources, to our cultural perception of conflict. Rather than relying on discourses based on Western conceptions of modernity, the project is dedicated to opening up new historical perspectives, exploring the potential of Islamist points of view as sources of critical and political debate.

In three series of black-and-white pictures, Randa Shaath meets and photographs the people who live in Cairo, Egypt's capital city. Under the Same Sky--Rooftops of Cairo documents the lives of people who inhabit the rooftops of the city's apartments. Profiles portrays a variety of local citizens, including painters and writers, poets and dancers, film directors and parking lot attendants. And In the Heart of the Nile captures the lives of the farmers and fishermen who live on the island Qursaya in the Nile, where the river runs through the center of Cairo. This monograph by Randa Shaath is part of the publications series being developed parallel to the project Contemporary Arab Representations.

Anonymous deserted buildings have dominated the photographic work of Efrat Shvily since she began to frame Israel's architecture in her images in the early 1990s. The buildings, so disconnected from their surroundings, point to the problematic relationship between the Israelis and their land. Shvily's New Homes in Israel and the Occupied Territories is a series of black-and-white photographs of houses and neighborhoods, which sometimes seem more like models than real buildings. In her desolate photos, Shvily does not make it clear whether the buildings were once inhabited and are now deserted, currently inhabited, or soon to be occupied. The series arose in reaction to the large number of new settlements that were realized in Israel in the 1990s. Perhaps because of the speed of these new developments, combined with the fact that construction projects are used as a means to occupy territory, the people who live in these places seem estranged from the land that surrounds them--a state of being that Shvily captures in her photos.

Conventions In Contemporary Art arose from the highly entertaining and much-discussed series of debates organized by Witte de With in 2001. Without lapsing into dull theoryspeak, it explores and questions the routines and fashions that dominate the art world today. Catherine David and Iwona Blazwick explore the curator's heightened profile; Jeroen Boomgaard and Koen Brams tackle theory and art; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby question the relationship between design and art; Bart Lootsma and Camiel van Winkel look at art in public spaces; and Janneke Wesseling and Kitty Zijlmans discuss the position of non-western art in the western world.

The 2001 cultural capitals of Europe, Rotterdam, and Porto, were besieged by international artists invited to design projects that explored these two cities, their urban spaces, and the ways in which these spaces function in their specific local conditions. The singular nature of each work in Squatters led to their existence as cell-like structures constitutive of mini-exhibitions that staked a claim on their urban sites and imbued them with new meaning.

Though composed of contemporary art, The People's Art refers to the Dutch democratic tradition of openness and tolerance. Dutch art, as the ironic corollary to the highly regulated Dutch landscape, orchestrates an alien Nether land of the unfathomable and unthinkable.

Eulalia Valldosera has created an oeuvre of unusual beauty since 1990. Valldosera works in the media of sculpture, installation, photography and performance in a variety of combinations. She distills a constellation of dreamlike moments centering on the female body, domestic environments and the everyday objects. Her intimate work is crafted from light, shadow, reflection and movement. This book presents a significant body of her work first time and is co-producted with Fundacio Antoni Tapies.

The globalized world is both hyper-connected and ever more rife with conflict. How to Gather brings together cultural and scientific practitioners who reflect on these conditions.

Drawing from work produced during Witte de With's In Light of 25 Years project, this publication documents newly commissioned pieces by artists Özlem Altın, Wineke Gartz, Camille Henrot, Germaine Kruip, Mahony, Raimundas Malasauskas, Zin Taylor, Freek Wambacq and Xu Zhen.

To produce his large-scale ink-based maps and diagrams, Chinese artist Qiu Zhije (born 1969) explores political and historical narratives, from Confucianism to the Enlightenment. This book includes his new "Map of the Third World," presented at the 2015 Moscow Biennale.

This publication investigates the circulation of art and its economies in the 21st century, as explored through Witte de With's three-part exhibition series Art in the Age of... (2015). It spans topics such as Energy and Raw Material, Planetary Computation and Asymmetrical Warfare.

Dutch multimedia artist Erik van Lieshout's (born 1968) provocative work often deals with violence, politics, sex and commercial culture. This publication elaborates on van Lieshout's vision and perception of the ethnically and culturally diverse city.

The latest photographer commissioned by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art to document Rotterdam is Lidwien van de Ven (born 1963). An artist who works in a realm parallel to photojournalism, Van de Ven chose to reverse the city-specific mandate of the project and portray Rotterdam as a microcosm of global developments at the intersection of politics and religion. Her photographs show how the visible and invisible are continually mediated by political forces.