PRESS RELEASE
Bernadette Corporation 19 November 2005 – 8 January 2006 Opening: Friday 18 November 2005, 5.30 p.m. From 19 November, 2005, to 8 January, 2006, Witte de With, center for contemporary art, will present Bernadette Corporation’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Since 1994 the anonymous international group of artists that use the Bernadette Corporation logo have worked in various combinations at the boundaries of fashion, art and activism. The mainspring of their varied artistic output appears to be avoidance of a specific identity. Bernadette Corporation has successively stood for an underground fashion label (1995-1997), a privately published art magazine called Made in USA (1999-2001), a collective novel called Reena Spaulings (Semiotext(e), 2005) and various videos and installations. Although the media used are extremely varied, what these products have in common is their playful, intelligent rendering of the concept and their deliberately limited duration. Witte de With has invited Bernadette Corporation to make a presentation documenting the last ten years of their work. The first materials of their new film production Pedestrian Cinema will also be shown for the very first time. Pedestrian Cinema Pedestrian Cinema is a Berlin-based independent film production company which explores the margins of the film medium. The company will be working for a year on a digital film in which the miseen-scène operates within an open-ended scenario. The first materials will be displayed on four different screens in Witte de With. For more information, see www.bernadettecorporation.com Group exhibitions by Bernadette Corporation (selection): Populism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; National Museum of Art, Architecture and
Design, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (April 2005); Now and Ten Years Ago, Kunst-Werke, Berlin (November 2004); Ex-Argentina, Ludwig Museum, Cologne (February 2004). Internet magazine Apart from this exhibition, a magazine will be published as a pilot project on Witte de With’s website, tracing a ‘story line’ within the artistic output of the 1990s. This longer-term project, which will bring various disciplines together to provide a historical context for the emergence of a broader institutional and aesthetic playing field during that period, will include contributions by Shumon Basar (Sexy Machinery, London), Claire Bishop (Royal College of Art, London), Andrea Fraser (artist and writer, Los Angeles), Payam Shafiry (artist and writer, London and Paris) and Daniël van der Velden (designer and writer, Amsterdam).
Opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Price: € 2.30 (Witte de With and TENT.) Discount: € 1.10 (<18, Students, CJP, Groups >10, MJK, >65) Free: <6, CKV, Rotterdampas Witte de With will be open on Monday December 26, 2005, and is closed on Sunday January 1, 2006 Witte de With, center for contemporary art, Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam t: +31 (0)10 411 01 44, f: +31 (0)10 411 79 24, e: info@wdw.nl, i: www.wdw.nl