| Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art was founded in 1990 and has since played an extremely important role in the cultural scene in Rotterdam. Locally, but also internationally, the institution has always seen its responsibility in addressing a broad audience, while contributing to what you might think of as a more culture-specific or critical discourse. Every project, exhibition or commission that is realized at Witte de With is conceived from within the institution—by the director, the curators, the education officer, the person in charge of publications et cetera. So in that sense, Witte de With never “sponsors” anything. |  |
A Cornerstone Institution – Curator Sophie von Olfers talks about Witte de With
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art was founded in 1990 and has since played an extremely important role in the cultural scene in Rotterdam. Locally, but also internationally, the institution has always seen its responsibility in addressing a broad audience, while contributing to what you might think of as a more culture-specific or critical discourse. Every project, exhibition or commission that is realized at Witte de With is conceived from within the institution—by the director, the curators, the education officer, the person in charge of publications et cetera. So in that sense, Witte de With never “sponsors” anything. There are, however, collaborations, when we see connections to other programs as relevant to the specifics of our institution. Witte de With is not a museum, it does not have a collection and it never buys art—every exhibition is produced specifically for its presentation at Witte de With. Actually, the only thing Witte de With ever bought was the building that it is housed in! That’s of course a very interesting and unusual position to be in.
Witte de With’s director is selected by the Board and remains in that post for three years, with the possibility of another three-year position. The current director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, was appointed in January 2006 and brought in three new curators, Florian Waldvogel, Zoe Gray and myself. That’s quite a lot for an institution the size of Witte de With, which only has ten full-time members of staff, but the rotating nature of the directors is key to the ethos of this institution and explains its transitory character. In many ways, that’s a luxury for an institution, it brings with it new approaches and ideas and is one of the many visions that Nicolaus Schafhausen has for Witte de With.
Witte de With’s first season under Schafhausen’s direction opened with a solo exhibition featuring Mathias Poledna and a group exhibition entitled Don Quijote. Don Quijote was meant as a kind of “prelude” to the program at Witte de With as well as a comment on where a new program may lead to—you never know! The exhibition included a number of international artists, some of whom are at the beginning of their artistic careers. This perhaps resulted in the fact that many of the works had a tragicomic element to them and portrayed a certain search or quest. Due to a dark filter that we used on the windows and an all-embracing “installation-landscape” by artist Michael Beutler, the atmosphere of the exhibition was very theatrical, staged and almost unsettling. Curatorially, the show tested the format of the group show and in a way questioned the conventional institutional exhibition as “the only way” to show art. Using the historic epic of Don Quijote with its idealistic battles, imaginary journeys and human failure as a metaphor, seemed like a perfect point of departure—allowing different engagements, whether personal, artistic or institutional, to be explored within the many daunting possibilities and impossibilities of culture today.
Forthcoming exhibitions include “Street: behind the cliché,” a group exhibition offering new approaches towards the idea of what “public space” can mean and a solo exhibition by Canadian artist Brian Jungen. We are also continuing to unravel the local cultural situation in Rotterdam with a publication that emerged from the week-long series of panel discussion “Unraveling Rotterdam” and are working on a conference called the “Periphery Complex” for February next year.
