Program Guide_EN_2012 by Witte de With

The Humans Alexandre Singh 26.04.12 — 06.01.13

Surplus Authors Group Exhibition 05.09.12 — 06.01.13

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Program Guide (EN)

What’s On in 2012

The Humans Alexandre Singh Over the upcoming six months, visual artist and writer Alexandre Singh transforms parts of Witte de With’s exhibition space (2nd floor) into an artist’s studio, a script room and a display area allowing visitors to witness the on-site development of The Humans. This project, a theatrical play with ‘creation’ as its central theme, to be performed in the Fall of 2013 along with monthly talks titled Causeries.

Causeries Inspired by Singh’s pre-production of his play, the Causeries are set up as a monthly series of intimate and lively discussions in which Singh expands on The Humans’ key themes, ranging from cosmology and cosmogony to pictorial satire, dance in drama, and religion. Conceived by Alexandre Singh and Defne Ayas, and organized in consultation with critic and writer Donatien Grau.

Studio Miessen Taking its cue from the history of Witte de With’s building, which was originally a girls’ school (erected in 1875), and a technical school in the 1970s, the Berlin-based collaborative agency Studio Miessen has developed a unique setting that includes a reading table, a bleacher covered with bright green artificial grass, and a multi-purpose yellow monolith on the second floor of the building. The giant modular cube, consisting of sixty-four separate blocks, provides a tailored, yet open platform and setting to stage and host discursive events. Also on the first floor is the Consensus Bar.

Prompts & Triggers While talk is thick these days about crisis, be it economical, ecological, cultural, or even spiritual, a larger question looms: how and where to situate value, especially in a context as diverse as the European continent? Already riddled with moving-target projections and contradictory positions — such as the game of keeping a rising China or a potent Turkey at bay, while attempting to capitalize on them at the same time, or the conscious and subconscious anxieties produced when personal religiosity is expected to be surrendered in favor of a secular public body — it would seem that different and differing interests are not easily encompassed in neat packages. Prompts & Triggers is a series of propositions by artists who call attention to certain conditions which spur social anxieties — and in doing so, ponder if such defense mechanisms actually betray underlying divides which must be first unpacked and examined. Meriç Algün Ringborg’s Prompts & Triggers – Line No. 2 (Holy Bible), which was on view at Witte de With from 26 April to 17 June 2012, transformed the Bible itself into an inescapable datum. From 28 June to 19 August 2012, Qiu Zhijie’s Blueprints mapped complex and anachronistic universes in which various histories of thought were enmeshed so as to question cultural origin myths, and related assumptions, and expectations. On 5 September, 2012, Prompts & Triggers looks with a group of artists at several fault lines inherent in the act of collabo ration from (art) historical and social indebtedness, to trust, generosity, incentivism, antagonism, and even co-option, while begging the question: is collaboration — a term that plays a hand in issues as large as international alliances — an end in and of itself, or is it a tenuous and unfolding process in which psychological, intellectual, and political dynamics are contested and reconstituted.

Currently at Witte de With

The Humans Alexandre Singh 26.04.12 — 06.01.13

Causeries The Humans Alexandre Singh June 2012 — April 2013

Surplus Authors Group Exhibition 05.09.12 — 06.01.13

Spatial Design Studio Miessen 26.04.12 — 06.01.13 5

Exhibition Floor Plans

Works

M Spatial Setting Design by Studio Miessen S Alexandre Singh The Humans

01 Ho Tzu Nyen, A Conference, 2011, video, 6:22 min. Courtesy of the artist and Arthub Asia

02 Annaïk Lou Pitteloud & Steve Van den Bosch, The Curators, 2009. Digital slide show, 9 min, color, looped, video, 16 min, color, sound. Courtesy of the artists

03 Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Hold Your Ground, 2012. Video HD, 13 min, looped. Courtesy of the artists and Galeri NON, Istanbul 04 Dora García, Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed: Lenny Bruce In Sydney, 2008. Video HD, 60 min, English version, with Richard Neville, Lawrence Shearer and Harli Ammouchi in the role of Lenny Bruce. Edition of 5 + 1 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam

05 MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness, 2011. Video, instruction manuals, research materials, 52:03 min. Courtesy of the artists and Long March Space, Beijing

2nd floor

13 16

15 Maya Deren, Meditation on Violence, 1948. Video, 12 min, black and white. 16 Jalal Toufic, How to Read an Image/Text Past a Surpassing Disaster?, 2010. 6 photographs and How to Read a Text, Past a Surpassing Disaster? booklets. Translation by Selim S. Kuru. Courtesy of the artist 17 Michael Blum & Damir Nikšić, Oriental Dream, 2010. Video, 7:30 min. Courtesy of the artists 18 Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer, The Infinite Library, 2007 – ongoing. Books. Courtesy of the artists 19 Chris Curreri and Luis Jacob, The Thing, 2008. Chromogenic print, series of 3 images, 29.2 × 36.2 cm each. Courtesy of the artists, Daniel Faria Gallery and Birch Libralato, Toronto

07 AA Bronson & Ryan Brewer, Blue, 2012. LED light box with diasec, 183 × 244 × 15 cm. Edition of 3. Courtesy of the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin

20 MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness, 2011. Video, instruction manuals, research materials, 52:03 min. Courtesy of the artists and Long March Space, Beijing

08 Wu Shanzhuan & Inga S. Thorsdottir, Echo, Narcissus, Sisyphus, 2011. Mural painting. Courtesy of the artists and Long March Space, Beijing

21 Club Moral —Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK) & Danny Devos (DDV), L’Age D’or/ I Wanna Be Injured, 1986 – present. 5 Super-8 films and 2 digital recordings, camera & concept: AMVK—performance: DDV. Courtesy of the artists 22 Oscar Tuazon, My flesh to your bare bones, 2010. Two-track audio. Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, New York

10 Falke Pisano & Ana Roldán, Dynamo, 2008 – 2012. 3 fabrics 150 × 150 cm, 4 single attributes and a set of 10 balls and 1 set of 2 gold-leaf sticks. Courtesy of the artists and Ellen de Bruijne Projects/Balice Hertling /Hollybush Gardens

11 Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, 2007. Single channel video, 30 min, color, sound, English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, part of the Dommering collection, Netherlands

18 7

14 Alicja Kwade, Annäherung (being Marilyn Monroe/Alicja Kwade), 2010 – 2012. Pen on paper, handwriting analysis, 11 parts, framed 39.4 × 30.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and private collection, Stuttgart

06 MadeIn Company, animation. Courtesy of the artists

09 Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Left Hand, Right Hand, 2006. Set of 2 videos, 2 min each. Courtesy of the artists and Chambers Fine Art, New York /Beijing

13 Alicja Kwade, Being Nicola Tesla (Alicja Kwade), 2011. Pen on paper, handwriting analysis, 4 parts, 3 frames 38 × 29 cm, 1 frame 38 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and private collection, Abensberg

12 Chris Evans, Company, 2009. Video, 6:32 min. Courtesy of the artist, Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam and Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin

8 10

19 22

3rd floor

The Humans Alexandre Singh 26.04.12 — 06.01.13

Alexandre Singh’s studio. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

A production in progress: an ongoing installation, multiple encounters or ‘Causeries,’ rehearsals and a play. Premiere Fall 2013

The monthly discursive events under the title of ‘Causerie’ explore subjects from Cosmogony, satire, theatrical costumes, to Aristophanes and scatology.

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art presents the on-site realization of The Humans, a theatrical performance by visual artist and writer Alexandre Singh.

This project, on view from 26 April until 6 January 2013, came into being after seven years of correspondence between the artist and Defne Ayas, Witte de With’s director.

Set before the Earth’s beginning in a protoworld populated by spirits, gods, artisans and men of clay and plaster, The Humans — with ‘creation’ its central theme — is modeled after the ancient Greek plays of Aristophanes. Whilst the theatrical references are ancient, the satire is utterly modern: religion, morality and human hubris are all mocked with an irreverent and biting tone.

The Humans Blog

The Humans evolves and changes over an eight-month period and includes a variety of formats, from presentations and rehearsals to discursive events that are informed by the props produced on site. Leading up to the final presentation of his play in the Spring of 2013, Singh transforms parts of Witte de With’s second floor into an artist’s studio, script and display rooms, and a workshop. This on-site realization of the artwork provides the audience with an insider’s look into the inner dynamics of artistic creation.

The Reader is a selection of texts that provide an insight into different themes the artist explores over the course of the project. It functions as an in-depth source of information and inspiration to The Humans. This booklet, available in limited printed copies for consultation at Witte de With only, is updated on a monthly basis parallel to the monthly public events titled Causeries.

To actively engage with the artist’s work, collaborations between experts and scholars from different disciplines are forged in order to inform and be informed, inspire and be inspired by the artworks on view, creating moments and opportunities for different disciplines to collide and engage with theater groups, youth choirs, set designers, prop-makers and costume-designers.

On a daily basis, Alexandre Singh posts on a dedicated tumblr page, visual material and other sources that serve as an inspiration in the development of his project The Humans: http://the-humans.tumblr.com/.

The Humans Reader

About Alexandre Singh Alexandre Singh (b. 1980, Bordeaux, France) is a visual artist and writer based in New York. Singh was brought up in Manchester, UK, before studying Fine Art at the University of Oxford, UK. Singh’s work derives at once from traditions in literature, performance, photoconceptualism and object-based installation art. Often starting with elaborate, publicly presented lectures that blend historical fact with narrative fiction, Singh’s practice resists categorization. His work has been exhibited in venues throughout Europe and the United States including The Serpentine Gallery, London; New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Sprüth Magers, Berlin. Singh’s work is held by a number of private and public collections including MoMA, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 9

Causeries The Humans, Alexandre Singh June 2012 — April 2013

As part of the realization of Alexandre Singh’s ambitious play The Humans, are Causeries. Taking its title from the French verb causer — to converse or chat — the Causeries are set up as a series of discussions in which Singh expands on The Humans’ key themes, ranging from cosmology and cosmogony to pictorial satire, dance, drama and religion. Rather than discursive events in the well-known format of a conference or a symposium, the Causeries are conceived as informal conversations between the artist and an expert in a given field. In this exchange, the edification of the artist himself is pivotal in the disclosure of the underlying themes of The Humans. The Creation: On Cosmogony and Cosmology – the first in the series of Causeries on 2 June 2012. Photography Erwin Nederhoff

Concept by Defne Ayas and Alexandre Singh, organized in collaboration with writer and critic Donatien Grau. Past participants include: Jessica Frazier (Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Lecturer in Religious Studies, Univ. of Kent), Andrew Jaffe (Prof. Astrophysics, Imperial College London), Bernadette Leclercq-Neveu (Prof. in the Classics Department, École Normale Supérieure in Paris), Bénédicte Lemmelijn (Prof. Theology, Catholic Univ. of Leuven), Alexander Verpoorte (Prof. in the Faculty of Archeology, Univ. of Leiden), Francis Wolff (Prof. in Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure Paris), Brian Dunphy (Prof. Radio & Television, Brooklyn College, NY), Pascal Dupuy (Prof. Early Modern History, Univ. of Rouen), Martin Myrone (Lead Curator Pre-1800 British Art at Tate Britain), Amy Kenny (Research Coordinator, Globe Theatre, London), Valeria de Lucca (Brit. Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Music, Univ. of Southampton), Alan Cummings (Sen. Teaching Fellow In Japanese, School of Oriental and African Studies, Univ. of London), Edith Hall (Prof. of Classics, King’s College, London), James Robson (Sen. Lecturer and HoD of Classical Studies, The Open Univ., London), Alexa Piqueux (Lect. departm. of Greek Culture, Univ. Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), and Adriaan Rademaker (Prof. Classical Language and Culture, Univ. of Leiden).

2 June 2012 The Creation: On Cosmogony and Cosmology 12 July 2012 Pictorial Satire: On Hogarth, Daumier and South Park 16 August 2012 Theatrical Costumes 13 September 2012 Aristophanes 11 October 2012 The Mountain in Art and Literature 15 November 2012 Artificial Moons (Lighting in Theater) 13 December 2012 Dance in Drama 17 January 2013 The Voice and The Chorus 14 February 2013 Literary Satire 14 March 2013 Scatology 11 April 2013 The Sculptor

Pictorial Satire: On Hogarth, Daumier and South Park – the second in the series of Causeries on 12 July 2012. Photography Michelle Elsen

The Creation: On Cosmogony and Cosmology The first in a series of Causeries, titled The Creation: On Cosmogony and Cosmology marks the grand kick-off for The Humans by visual artist and writer Alexandre Singh and its parallel program of discussion. The day focuses on the idea of creation, viewed through the lenses of religious and mythological narratives as well as through developments in present-day science. This variety of sources brings to the forefront a wealth of divergent traditions ranging from Greek and Indian mythologies to theories in astro physics and archaeology, and explores the creation of the universe, the earth and our very own origins.

Pictorial Satire: On Hogarth, Daumier and South Park This Causerie explores the satirical impulse in visual culture from the 18th century to present times. Different expressions of pictorial satire are discussed in several informal conversations, also highlighting the satire that lies at the heart of Alexandre Singh’s The Humans. With an emphasis on both the British and French tradition, the work of pictorial satirists like William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier will be pivotal to this causerie, alongside with more contemporary forms of satire such as the television show South Park.

Theatrical Costumes Costumes have always been an integral part of theater, which makes an exploration in this field indispensable in the realization of Alexandre Singh’s play The Humans. In the third of this series of Causeries, experts from different disciplines are invited to discuss the origins and evolution of theatrical costumes from a variety of traditions and periods — ranging from Shakespeare, Commedia dell’Arte and the Japanese tradition of Kabuki Theater.

Aristophanes The Greek playwright Aristophanes (ca. 446 BC – ca. 386 BC) was feared for his social commentary on the society of Athens during his time. In his plays, of which only eleven survived up to today, he ridicules the political situation of Athens and his contemporaries by means of a vast amount of satirical jokes and puns. As part of his ongoing project The Humans, visual artist Alexandre Singh explores the rich satirical legacy of Aristophanes, The Prince of Comedy. The fourth in the series of Causeries marks Aristophanes as a source of inspiration to the artist and brings together several experts to explore a wide range of subjects — from the chorus, costumes and staging to the social and political context of ancient Greece, amidst of which the plays were written.

The Mountain in Art and Literature The 19th century critic and painter John Ruskin believed mountains to be the beginning and the end of all natural scenery. For long, mountains have been regarded as awe-inspiring yet hostile places; sites that are simultaneously feared, respected and worshiped. As such, they took a special place in our art history during the Romantic period, with many artists endeavoring to capture its magnificence and the sublime effects they often evoked. Yet earlier cultures had already adopted mountains as objects of worship, and sites of holiness and power. In this Causerie titled The Mountain in Art and Literature, visual artist and writer Alexandre Singh explores different expressions of the mountain in our culture, ranging from Asian mountain hermits to European Romanticism.

Surplus Authors Group Exhibition 05.09.12 — 06.01.13 Opening: Wednesday 5 September, 5 – 10pm Outside of personal romance, collaboration is perhaps the most elemental form of politics — just consider how the term plays a hand in issues as basic as “two heads are better than one” and as large as international alliances. To crack open this power relation, Surplus Authors looks at a group of artists whose work traces and delineates several fault lines inherent in the act of collaboration from (art-)historical and social indebtedness, to trust, generosity, incentives, antagonism, and even cooption. Without laying claim to any illustrative narratives, Surplus Authors presents itself during a growing call for institutions to work together as a promised means to alleviate the reasons for austerity. As a possible retort, Surplus Authors begs another question: is collabora-tion an end in and of itself, or is it a tenuous and unfolding process in which psychological, intellectual, and political dynamics are contested and reconstituted? Participating artists: Michael Blum & Damir Nikšić, AA Bronson & Ryan Brewer, Club Moral, Maya Deren, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer, Chris Evans, Dora Garcia, Luis Jacob & Chris Curreri, Alicja Kwade, MadeIn Company, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud & Steve Van den Bosch, Ana Roldán & Falke Pisano, Wu Shanzhuan & Inga S. Thorsdottir, Hito Steyerl, Jalal Toufic, Oscar Tuazon and Ho Tzu Nyen. Surplus Authors is curated by Defne Ayas together with Philippe Pirotte and forms part of Prompts & Triggers.

AA Bronson & Ryan Brewer, Blue, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Marianne Flotron, Work (2011) Saturday 6 October 2012, 5pm

Marianne Flotron talks to Philippe Pirotte and other guests about how she used methods of Agusto Boal’s participatory Theatre of the Oppressed in a Dutch insurance company, in order to expose the unconscious mimetic moulding of the employees into the economic goals of the company. Marianne Flotron (b. Meiringen, Switzerland, 1970) is mainly interested in the interrelationship between political and economic systems and human behavior. How the subject creates the society and how, in return, the society is creating its subjects, forms a basis for her work, in which she recently employed different role playing techniques in which she explores the impact of social science on behaviour. She earned her degree at the School of Fine Arts of Geneva in 2001. She had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2011. Other recent exhibitions include Monumentalisme, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2010), Motores utopicos, sensores reais Galeria Quarta Parede, Sao Paulo (2011), Schon wieder und noch mal, Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz (2011).

Angela Melitopoulos & Maurizio Lazzarato, Assemblages (2010) Thursday 25 October 2012, 7pm

Angela Melitopoulos presents Assemblages (2010), an audio-visual research project in the format of a lecture-performance. Angela Melitopoulos (b. Munich, 1961), is an artist who realizes video-essays, video installations, documentaries and sound pieces. Her videos focus of duration and timestructures, on mnemonic microprocesses in electronic/ digital media and documentation. She is collaborating in political networks in Europe and publishes theoretical articles on her artwork and on mnemopolitics. Melitopoulos has exhibited in, among others, Generali Foundation Vienna, Berlinale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Antonin Tapies Foundation Barcelona, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Manifesta 7, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum New York. 15

Works in the exhibition 2nd Floor

Ho Tzu Nyen A Conference, 2011

Ho Tzu Nyen’s (b. 1976, Singapore) practice includes filmmaking, painting, performance, and writing, through which he investigates the forms, methods, and languages of art, the relationship between the still, the painted, and the moving image, and the construction of history. Similarly to AnnaÏk Lou Pitteloud & Steve Van den Bosch’s The Curators (2009), Ho Tzu Nyen’s film A Conference (2009) was produced during collaborative platform Arthub Asia’s symposium The Making of the New Silk Roads held in Bangkok (2009), which brought together more than thirtyfive renowned artists, curators, and cultural practitioners from across Asia who had been collaborating with each other over three years leading up to the event. The Making of the New Silk Roads was set up as an aesthetic and conceptual construction with an emphasis on dramaturgy and choreography. Invited to both film and document this collaborative platform, Ho Tzu Nyen

freed himself from the “anxiety of participa tion,” as he words it, and hired an actor to stand in for him as a participant while he joined the documentation team that recorded the event. The result is a metafilm, about which the artist states: “Not being an immediate participant but part of the ‘documentary’ team turned out to be a fascinating experience, a kind of position both inside and outside at the same time. Through the lens of the camera, I could feel the intangible, but nevertheless concrete dimension of the symposium — its atmosphere, its moments of heaviness and lightness. I think of this video as physiological documentation of the symposium, a narrative of faces, gestures, and energies. Perhaps it is an attempt to create a kind of group portrait. But I guess it could also be a dream, or perhaps a love story (the most commonplace of all stories) — a story of things coming together, and falling apart.” Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976, Singapore) investigates history and ideas through audio-visual means. Recent one-person exhibitions of his work include MAM Project #16 at the Mori Art Museum (2012), the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Earth at Artspace, Sydney (2011). He has also shown at the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009); the Dojima River Biennale (2009); the 1st Singapore Biennale (2006); the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005); and the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004). His theatrical experiments have been presented at Theater der Welt (2010), the KunstenFestivaldesArts (2006, 2008) and the Singapore Arts Festival (2006, 2008). His first feature film HERE premiered at the 41st Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival (2009) and his medium length film, EARTH, premiered at the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2009).

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud & Steve Van den Bosch The Curators, 2009

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud (b. 1980, Lausanne) articulates critical reflections on cultural and social issues through a variety of media, using minimal forms to suggest a narrative and to refer to an art historical context as a flexible grid in which these reflections can be invested. For The Curators (2009), she collaborated with Steve Van den Bosch (b. 1975, Antwerp) whose work focuses on the implications of artistic practice. Not confined to any specific medium, he researches the parameters that define (a) work, dismantling them in order to re-use and disrupt via aberrant forms that end up questioning their own status. Annaïk Lou Pitteloud and Steve Van den Bosch’s installation The Curators is a recording of the public conference Rotterdam Dialogues: The Curators presented at Witte de With as part of the symposium series Rotterdam Dialogues: The Critics, The Curators, The Artists, held over three occa sions between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009. Each three-day event focused on one agent in the art world, looking at

their expectations, positions, and the contexts in which they operate, and brought together thirty-five international critics, forty-eight curators, and fifty-seven artists. It was a platform for collaboration between artists and curators and their respective positions in the art world. While the institution and the conference itself are rendered anonymous, or appear as if it could have been ‘any’ institution or ‘any other’ con-ference, The Curators focuses on the way the conference represented itself. For example, the huge omnipresent monochromes mounted throughout the different spaces are not artworks but serve as panels to muffle sound reverberation; adhesive wall texts are not the usual museum explanations or conceptual text pieces but one-liners distilled from the history of curating and used as catchphrases for a public meeting. The presence of these elements guarantees the visuality of the event by using the image of an exhibition as a backdrop. Within the installation The Curators, the slideshow literally shows this image of the conference as an ambiguous façade. While the slides formally seem to refer to the genre of authorial ‘objective’ photography, they are in fact carefully con structed stand-ins for this genre. Alongside these still images, a video projection with sound takes the spectator through the conference, offering a closer view of the event from the inside, which, at first glance, seems to be a more direct and truthful documen tation of the happening. But the video folds back on itself, essentially implicating the video maker and, much like amateur film, shows her or his subjective points of attention (or lack thereof) rather than fulfilling the expectations of an all-encom passing documentary view.

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud (b. 1980, Lausanne). Recent exhibitions include Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, Bern, CH, Procedure (2009); Espace des télégraphes, Lausanne, CH, Setting Up The Process (2009). Upcoming exhibitions in 2012 include The 9th Shanghai Biennale – City Pavilions (group show) and Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zürich, CH, 1 + 7 = 1 (solo show). Steve Van den Bosch (b. Antwerp, 1975). Recent solo shows of him include Quote unquote, galerie Vandermieden, Antwerp, (2011); Untilted, Artis, ‘s Hertogenbosch (2009); E N D, galerie Alexandre Pollazzon Ltd, London (2008). In 2012 his work will be shown in ExtraCity, Antwerp, Elements for a retrospective; at Galerii Noorus, Tartu, EE, Sõida tasa üle silla (group show); and at the 9th Shanghai Biennale – City Pavilions (group show).

Karen Mirza & Brad Butler Hold Your Ground, 2012

The practice of Karen Mirza (b. 1969, Evesham) and Brad Butler (b. 1973, London) consists of filmmaking, drawing, installation, photo graphy, performance, publishing, and curating. Their work Hold Your Ground (2012) is a companion piece to a larger film work, scripted in conjunction with author China Miéville. Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring and triggered by the artists’ encounter in Cairo with a pamphlet of instructions for pro-democracy demonstrators, called “How to Protest Intelligently,” the piece dissects the semantics of the crowd, and the resulting

performative speech act. Conceived for a site at Canary Wharf, London, this work calls forth the struggle to turn ‘fugitive sounds’ into speech, addressing an audience pre dominantly in transit. Since 2009, Mirza and Butler have developed a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation, which is interested in representing and interrogating political resistance and aesthetics. The Museum of Non Partici pation draws on the geopolitical tensions experienced when working in locations such as Cairo, London, and Karachi and seeks to make present those experiences, positioning the museum as a conceptual construct of gesture and image that negotiates the thresholds of language and translation. Karen Mirza (b. 1969, Evesham) and Brad Butler’s (b. 1973, London), practice consists of filmmaking, drawing, installation, photography, performance, publishing and curating. Since 2009, they have developed a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation which is interested in representing and interrogating political resistance and aesthetics. The Museum of Non Participation draws on the geopolitical tensions experienced by working in locations such as Cairo, London and Karachi and seeks to make present those experiences, positioning the museum as a conceptual construct of gesture and image that negotiates the thresholds of language and translation. Solo exhibitions, screenings and performances include The Museum of Non Participation performance, NON and nowiswere, Istanbul, 2011; The Daily Battle, VIVID, Birmingham, 2011; The Museum of Non-Participation, an Artangel commission, London, 2009. Group exhibitions and screenings include Museum Show Part Two, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2011; They don’t know why, but they keep doing it, Waterside Contemporary, London, 2011.

Dora García Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed: Lenny Bruce In Sydney, 2008

In her practice, Dora García (b. 1965, Valladolid) continuously investigates the nature of collaboration as well as the fundamental conditions that shape the encounter bet ween the artist, the artwork, and the viewer. Her work — ranging from performance, video, text, and installation — often involves staging unscripted scenarios that elicit doubt as to the fictional or spontaneous nature of a given situation. She also explores the poli tical potential rooted in marginal positions, focusing on figures such as the outsider, the outcast, and the outlaw, and pays, through several works, homage to eccentric and often anti-heroic personas, including stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. Bruce, one of the most fascinating and tragic personalities of the revolutionary 1960s, visited Sydney on 6 September 1962. He was only able to deliver a one-sentence performance: after saluting the public with the words: “What a fucking wonderful audience!”

he was promptly arrested on grounds of obscenity. A young Richard Neville, an Australian who would later become the guru of London’s counterculture, saw this brief performance and, understanding the importance of Bruce’s position within the generational revolution that was about to begin, attempted to organize a new perfor mance at the University of New South Wales. The Australian authorities would not allow Bruce to perform and he was asked to leave the country, never to return. With Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed: Lenny Bruce In Sydney (2008), García has imagined the performance that never took place, and, during the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), ‘allowed’ Lenny Bruce to finally speak, via an actor performing a script written by García in which she imagines Bruce’s delivery intertwined with his reflexive thoughts on the initial event. Dora García (b. 1965, Valladolid) uses a range of media including performance, video, text and installation. Her practice investigates the conditions that shape the encounter between the artist, the artwork and the viewer. Her work focuses more particularly on the notions of duration, access and readability, concerned with the privilege afforded to “those in the know”. García has recently presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2010), Index Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2010) and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela (2009). Her work has been shown in numerous museums and international exhibitions, including dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), Venice Biennale (2011), The Flower of May as part of the Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju (2010), Biennale de São Paulo (2010), Heaven, the 2nd Athens Biennial, Athens (2009), Le spectacle du quotidien, the 10me Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2009), Sydney Biennale (2008), and Münster Sculpture Projectes (2007).

Works in the exhibition 3rd Floor

MadeIn Company Physique of Consciousness, 2011

MadeIn Company (established 2009) is an art production company founded in Shanghai by leading conceptual artist Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai). Drawing on Xu Zhen’s vast array of experiences over the past decade, not only as an artist, but also as an arts organizer (having directed an artist-run space, founded an online art forum, and organized and curated several artist-initiated collaborative exhibitions), the company provides a com prehensive approach towards art creation, blurring the lines between exhibition, pro duction, and curating, as well as authorship. Physique of Consciousness (2011), initiated by MadeIn Company, is the first cultural fitness exercise strategy ever made. It comprises movements derived from dance, gymnastics, and spiritual and cultural rituals. The whole series is composed of more than 200 steps and moves inspired by 100 ceremonies, worship practices, and traditions accumulated through the history of humanity, and combines physical and spiritual virtues to enhance the body’s condition and well-being.

As dance can be a form of expression and collective ritual, Physique of Consciousness reflects the diversity of movements that bring people together, but the routine also continues a Chinese tradition of exerciseas-ideology: the boxers had their secret martial arts, Yan’an communists their (reform) yangge, a dance retrieved from a folk tradition. Presented here, on the 2nd floor, is an instructional video for the exercises where movements are flowing, peaceful, and aesthetic, and accompanied by relaxing music. MadeIn Company’s exhibitions include: Seeing One’s Own Eyes – Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition, ShanghART Gallery & H-Space, Shanghai (2009), S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2009); Physique of Consciousness, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2011), Long March Space, Beijing (2011). MadeIn company also participated in the 8th Shanghai Biennale and the 7th Busan Biennale, Korea (both 2010), and group exhibitions at UCCA, Beijing (2009) and Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2011), among others. Curatorial projects in Shanghai include the group show, Bourgeoisified Proletariat, Shanghai Songjiang Creative Studio (2009), besides exhibitions at MadeIn Space (2010) and TOP Contemporary Art Center (2011).

See also [20] on pp. 26 – 27.

AA Bronson & Ryan Brewer Blue, 2012

Ryan Brewer (b. 1985, Michigan) and AA Bronson (b. 1946, Vancouver) began collaborating in the summer of 2011 with three works: Black, Red, and Gold. Each portrait—two of Brewer, one of Bronson— documents a ritual enacted publicly, but without an invited audience, in the Magic Forest, a maze of sex paths, pine trees, and underbrush that joins the two gay communities of Fire Island, on the southern shore of Long Island in New York. Cherry Grove and The Pines have been a queer destination for six decades, and many came to spend their last days here during the height of the American HIV/AIDS crisis. For Brewer and Bronson, this is an environment thick with spirit, and the works begin from that history. Blue (2012) is the most recent of their collaborations in the Magic Forest, shot in February 2012, a time of year when the island is normally abandoned. Photo graphed by Matthias Herrmann, the work features Ryan Brewer (in white) together with Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur and AA Bronson (both in blue).

AA Bronson (b. 1946, Vancouver) was a founding member of the artists’ group General Idea (1969-1994). General Idea had over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide in its 25 years together and was represented in the Paris, Venice, Sydney, and São Paulo Biennales, as well as Documenta. Since the deaths of his partners in 1994, AA Bronson has worked as a solo artist, with exhibitions at the Secession, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge; and the Power Plant, Toronto, amongst others. From 2004 to 2010 he was the Director of Printed Matter, New York, where he founded The New York Art Book Fair. In 2010 he founded the Institute for Art, Religion & Social Justice. Ryan Brewer (b. 1985, Michigan) is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in sculpture and performance, focusing on issues of contemporary queer mythology, personal and collective trauma, and a collision of Jungion Archetypes with Eastern and Western occult mysticism. In 2011 he was awarded a residency at the Fire Island Artist residency, the first artist-in-residency program for emerging LGBT artists in the U.S. Ryan began showing collabora tively with AA Bronson in the fall of 2011.

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga S. Thorsdottir Echo, Narcissus, Sisyphus, 2011

“It dies just before it begins, and lives just after it ends. We have incorporated our perfect brackets within an infinite spiral, and use these brackets to repeatedly cut into the spiral’s coil in order to configure their self-rotation and recovery.”

A gnomic quote sets the tone for the ongoing collaboration between the couple Wu Shanzhuan (b. 1960, Zhoushan) and Inga Svala Thorsdottir (b. 1966, Iceland). Wu Shanzhuan, (b. 1960, Zhoushan), graduated in 1986 from Normal Department of the Zejiang Art Academy, and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1985 he founded Red Humour and five years later later Red Humour International. Inga Svala Thorsdottir, (b. 1966, Iceland). She gratuated in 1991 from the Painting Department of the Icelandic School of Arts and Crafts and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. She is the founder of Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service (1993) and BORG (1999). Since 1991 Thorsdottir and Wu have been working and exhibiting collaborative. They live and work in Hamburg and Shanghai. Recent exhibitions of Shanzhuan and Thorsdottir include Kuo Xuan, Long March Space, (2011); Thing’s Right(s) 09 The More, Wu Shanzhuan, Red Humour International & Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service, Shanghai Gallery of Art (2009); Wu Shanzhuan BUT STILL RED, Red Humour International in collaboration with Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service, Guangdong Museum of Art (2008); Thing’s Right(s) – New York 2001, Making Your Own Nationality, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts (2001). In 2009 their work was part of the exhibition A Gift to Marco Polo during the Venice Biennale.

Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen Left Hand, Right Hand, 2006

While maintaining independent practices, artists Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing) and Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing) also explore the idea of collaboration, devising their own ideological framework for working together

inspired by China’s most famous ‘couple’: a pair of chopsticks. Presented here is the video Left Hand, Right Hand (2006), which forms part of Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s on-going collaborative project The Way of Chopsticks (began in 2002, coinciding with the couple’s ten-year wedding anniversary). The project began with the artists agreeing to each make one chopstick-shaped sculpture of the same size, with all other aesthetic considerations made separately and in secret. Surprisingly, they rendered their respective chopsticks with the same theme, the central axis of Beijing as it existed historically and in the present, but using different materials. At its most elemental, this project consists of a simple binary: as with the relation between husband and wife, one chopstick needs the other in order to properly function. Following the inauguration of The Way of Chopsticks, the artists have continued to produce collaborative works in which one half is made by Song Dong and the other half by Yin Xiuzhen. In the video Left Hand, Right Hand, which was made during the artists’ visit to New York City in 2006, one screen shows Song Dong’s hand and the other Yin Xiuzhen’s, leaving it up to the viewer to guess which is which. Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing) and Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing), each maintain independent artistic practices yet explore the idea of collaboration itself by devising their own ideological framework for working together based on China’s most famous ‘couple’, a pair of chopsticks. Both have recently been shown in solo projects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yin Xiuzhen has shown at the 52nd Venice Biennale, the Schirin Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Gwangju Biennial. Song Dong’s work has been featured at Documenta 13, the 54th Venice Biennale, Asia Society in New York, the Fundació Joan Miró, the 8th

Instanbul Bienale and the 26th Sao Paolo Biennale. Song has also won several awards for his work including commendation at the 2010 Gwanju Biennale in Korea and as a UNESCO/ASCHBERG Bursary Laureate.

Falke Pisano & Ana Roldán Dynamo, 2008 – 2012

The works of Ana Roldán (b. 1977, Mexico City) and Falke Pisano (b. 1978, Amsterdam) often question and challenge the conventions of perception and traditional conceptions of sculpture. Common to both artists’ practices is the exploration of the interrelationships between objects, their individual context, and symbolic meaning Dynamo (2008) is a collaborative floor installation consisting of three fabric pieces printed with drawings that originate from Roldán and Pisano’s earlier works. On each of these fabric pieces, both artists have placed an object from a previous exhibition, installation, or from the artists’ studio, bringing together their respective practices. The objects are imbued with history and meaning, embodying Roldán and Pisano’s collaborative relationship, and are presented here to create a new context for interpretation. According to a set of rules developed in dialogue between both artists, the objects on display at Witte de With change their position sixteen times through-

out the exhibition period, over fifty-four days, continuously entering into new con stellations. Viewers are invited to witness this complex, game-like process, which testifies to the actions of others. Falke Pisano’s (b. 1978, Amsterdam) diagrammatic works expose a loop, in which shifting abstract sculptural forms are conceived directly in relation to written and spoken language, implying an ongoing and morphing production of meaning. Her works focus on modernity conceived as a long process in continual transformation, determined by the life experiences from which it is viewed, the succession of artistic objects over time and the transformation of structures of communication and perception. Previous exhibition of her work include The Body in Crisis, De Vleeshal (Middelburg, 2012); Performing Abstraction, Luciana Brito Gallery, Sao Paulo (2012), Abstract Possible, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2012), Desert Solitaire, Benoît Maire & Falke Pisano, CAC, Vilnius (2011), 7 little mistakes, Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2010), Ein Per formanceprojekt, KUB Arena/Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010); Falke Pisano/Ana Roldán, Dynamo, Kunsthaus Glarus (2010); Falke Pisano (Conditions of Agency), Extra City (2010). Ana Roldán (b. 1977, Mexico City) is inspired by cultural phenomena: Historical events, philosophical ideas, language, systems, reflections on aesthetics; theoretical concepts in general. Her work explores how the spectators can be stimulated in a physical way as well as in an intellectual way through the opposition or displacement of the mentioned systems. Recent exhibitions of her work include It is black but it doesn’t mean that it is empty, annex14, Bern(2011); Blank Back Mirror, Kunsthaus Langenthal (2011); Forms of contemplation, ideal forms in compositions, Badischer Kunstvereim (2011); Cococompositions, Dolores, Ellen de Brunije Projects (2010).

Hito Steyerl Lovely Andrea, 2007

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich) is an artist and an author whose background lies in docu mentary film-making. While what inspires her choice of genre is the French film director Jean-Luc Godard, the subject matter that plays out in her film Lovely Andrea (2007) is much more personal: The death of her childhood friend Andrea Wolf, a member of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), who was murdered in Turkey in 1998. Her body has never been found. In Steyerl’s first film about Wolf, the artist combined home movies shot while they were teenagers with recent documentary footage that charted her friend’s transition from naive idealist to political activist. She called the film November: the month following the 1917 Russian Revolution and a period categorized by disillusionment. In the film Lovely Andrea — presented in this exhibition— Steyerl’s references to Wolf are more ambiguous. The work follows the artist as she returns to Japan — where she worked in the 1980s as a bondage model under the assumed name Andrea — to search for a photograph of herself. Steyerl interleaves the narrative with film clips that include superheroes 24

Spider-Man and Wonder Woman and atroc ities meted out to Guantanamo inmates, played out like a psychological thriller in which Steyerl is both detective and the missing subject.

artwork where seriousness and irony battle for primacy. He likes to throw personal, poetic, and imaginative investigation directly into the path of bureaucrats, office workers, institutions or blue chip companies.

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich) is filmmaker and writer, based in Berlin. Steyerl started out as an essay filmmaker and successively moved into the art field. She works as a professor for New Media in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Arts Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam (2011), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2010), After the crash, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2010); Ricochet #3, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2010); Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden (2010). Group exhibitions include Remote Control, ICA Arts London (2012); K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, Les Marques; Centre d’ Art Contemporain Geneve; Neue Galerie, Kassel; Kunst-Werke Berlin (all 2011); Antiphotojournalism, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, Biennial; 1st Ural Biennial; Gwangju Biennial; Antiphotojournalism, La Virreina, Barcelona; Horizons, BAK, Utrecht (all 2010).

Taking direction from Allan Kaprow’s score Company (1984), an interview was set up with Walid El Kafrawy, Chief Executive of ofok (Arabic for “horizon”)—a construction company dedicated to the conception of new communities in the Egyptian desert’s “intimate serenity.” Encouraging this particular participant to meditate on his experience of living, the story of his personal life, and its effect on a nation, a film script was then co-authored with Will Bradley and edited by El Kafrawy. The film features the latter in front of the camera,reciting his own words that are fed to him through an earpiece, transposed with images of the construction of his family’s vast real estate projects. Rather than focusing on the real estate construction process itself, its procedural structure and active participation, the emphasis is, instead, on El Kafrawy — his social standing and the context this creates.

Chris Evans Company, 2009

With an interest in the relationship between art and power, Chris Evans (b. 1967, Eastrington) explores how artists compete with or complement political networks and the infrastructures of large corporations. His work usually starts with a meeting or a series of conversations and results in an

Chris Evans’ (b. 1967, Eastrington) work often evolves through conversation with people from diverse walks of life, selected in relation to their public life or symbolic role: the directors of a leading champagne house, a former member of the British Constructivists, the CEO of a Texas pharmaceutical company, a selection of elderly Italian politicians etcetera. Sculptures, letters, drawings, film scripts and unwieldy social situations created as a result of this, are indexes of a larger structure through which Evans deliberately confuses the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at: Goofy Audit, Luettgenmeijer, Berlin (2011); The Cell That Doesn’t Believe In The Mind That It’s Part Of, Marres, Maastricht (2010); I Don’t Know If I’ve Explained Myself, Mala Galerija, Ljubljana (2010) and Take A Bureaucratic Bow, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2009). His work has also been shown as part of The Indirect exchange of

uncertain value, Collective Gallery (2010), Taipei Biennial (2010), Talk Show, ICA, London (2009) and The Impossible Prison, Nottingham Contemporary (2008).

13, 14

Alicja Kwade Annäherung (being Marilyn Monroe / Alicja Kwade) Being Nicola Tesla (Alicja Kwade), 2011

Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice) engages with different aspects of collective value systems and with abstract processes such as becoming the other while transforming the self. For the body of work presented here, Kwade carefully copied hand-written letters, attempting to embody different renowned personalities. With Annäherung (being Marilyn Monroe/Alicja Kwade) (2010 – 2012), she copied letters which actress Marilyn Monroe wrote to John Huston informing him of her refusal to play the role of Annie O, one of Freud’s most famous female patients. Kwade’s letter was then given to a grapho logist for a character analysis, without informing the latter of the original author of 25

the letter. This analysis was repeated once more two years later to see if time had influenced the graphologist’s findings. The other work by the artist presented here is Being Nicola Tesla (Alicja Kwade) (2011), which followed the same methodology, except in this case Kwade embodied Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor and scientist, writing to a sponsor about having found a perfect location to build a free power station. Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice) lives and works in Berlin, where she studied at the Universität der Künste until 2005. In 2008 she won the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, which was conjoined with a large solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Recently her work has been shown at Oldenburger Kunstverein, Kunstverein Bremerhaven, MARTa Herford, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, K21, Düsseldorf and Fondation Ricard, Paris.

Maya Deren Meditation on Violence, 1948

In the film Meditation on Violence (1948), Maya Deren’s (1917 – 1961) camera is motivated by the movement of the performer Chao-Li Chi, characterized by two opposite schools of thought in the martial arts: Wu-Tang and Shaolin.

Meditation onViolence was an attempt to “abstract the principle of ongoing meta morphosis,” found in one of her earlier short films, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1942). Halfway through the film, Chao-Li Chi’s movement sequence is reversed, producing a loop in the film and disrupting the relation ship between violence and beauty, between the filmmaker and her focal point. The film shifts in both costume and scenery, and the protagonist’s Wu-Tang sequence, a style in which boxers are trained to ‘swallow’ the force used against them and return it in the opposite direction, with a focus on balance and reaction rather than the generation of force and strength (it is known as an ‘interior’ martial art), cuts to the featuring of Shaolin, with physical movements that are much more frantic. Meditation on Violence is a reflection on the relationship between art and violence, and Deren seems to conclude that violence begins when the body is not seen as whole, and when the boxer adds further force into the environment rather than channeling and transforming that of his aggressor. Maya Deren (b. Kiev, 1917 as Eleanora Derenkowskaia – New York, 1961) was an experimental filmmakers and promoter of the avantgarde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. She used the camera, as she envisioned medieval witches and magicians did, ‘defy’ time and space through the disappearance and reappearance of objects.

Jalal Toufic How to Read an Image/Text Past a Surpassing Disaster?, 2010

Jalal Toufic (b. 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad to an Iraqi father and a Lebanese mother born in Haifa, former Palestine) lived in Lebanon for over two decades and has been based in Istanbul for several years now. In his 2011 book What Were You Thinking?, Toufic writes: “The substitution of the Latin script for the Arabic one and the linguistic cleansing through the concerted removal of many Arabic words from Turkish language in the Republic of Turkey are a symptom of a withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster. Unlike republican Turkey, Ottoman Turkey was a cosmopolitan culture, indeed one of the great cosmopolitan cultures. Cosmopolitan cultures do not get rid of the ‘foreign’ without losing the native, for getting rid of what is ‘foreign’ is so disastrous, especially for a cosmopolitan culture, it often amounts to a surpassing disaster, with the consequent withdrawal of tradition, including of the native (component of it). Nowhere is this clearer than in the attempt by the Republic of Turkey to get rid of the Arabic and Persian words that were part of Ottoman

culture and language, ending up making the vast majority of Turks unable to read Ottoman inscriptions and manuscripts, which were written in the Arabic script, so that these became uncanny, something one encounters as unreadable, if not foreign while knowing that it should be familiar (to those Turks who would expect any yabancı [foreigner] to have learnt Turkish ‘by now,’ for example me after two years in Turkey, my response is: I expect you by now to have learnt Ottoman, or at the very least to have learnt the Arabic script so you can read, if not fully understand the inscriptions on your mosques, palaces and on the main gate of your largest university, Istanbul University). The native is what fits, the foreign is what does not fit, and tradition is what fits and does not fit. The native is the proximate, the foreign is the distant, and tradition is what remains distant however close one gets (hence its aura*) — this characteristic of tradition becomes clearer in the aftermath of surpassing disasters.” In Toufic’s author’s note to the booklet “How to Read a Text Past a Surpassing Disaster?,” which is part of his mixed-media work How to Read an Image/Text Past a Surpassing Disaster? (2010), he writes: “No one has yet shown an interest in translating my published yet forthcoming book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) to Turkish notwith standing that in the 1920s and 1930s Turkey exemplified such a withdrawal!

* Walter Benjamin, “We define the aura […] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 216.

Until Selim S. Kuru did, at my instigation, a translation of part of the book to Ottoman, I would have refused any request for the translation of the book to Turkish, indicating that the book’s translation to Ottoman is a condition of possibility of its translation to Turkish. Will such a translation to Ottoman contribute to the resurrection of tradition? Will such a translation of a published yet forthcoming book to an ostensibly past and largely forgotten language prove to be itself forthcoming even after its publication? ” Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Āshūrā’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Underserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009), Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), What Is the Sum of Recurrently? (2010), and The Portrait of the Pubescent Girl: A Rite of Non-Passage (2011). Many of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He was a guest for the year 2011 of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. Selim S. Kuru is Director of the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Program and an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington.

Michael Blum & Damir Nikšić Oriental Dream, 2010

Michael Blum (b. 1966, Jerusalem) invited Damir Nikšić (b. 1970, Brezovo Polje) to conceive a collaborative project that tackled the Ottoman Empire’s ruins from Bosnia to Palesrael. Once their work together commenced, Blum and Nikšić turned their attention to the question of Orientalism in general, as well as Western accounts of ‘Oriental’ life from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in particular, accounts made of fascination and condescendence. Starting with common examples of representations of the Orient in Western popular culture, particularly in literature (from Albert d’Aix’s chronicle of the First Crusade to Rebecca West’s trip to Yugoslavia), music (The Four Lads’ Istanbul not Constantinople) and film (Lawrence of Arabia), what also interests the artists is the humor that arises from the gap between the positivist belief in the West’s superiority up to the 1960s, and the general skepticism, even bitter cynicism, of younger generations. What resulted from this exploration is Oriental Dream, a whimsical critique of Orientalist traces still present throughout the Balkan

landscape. Their work is crafted in the form of a short slapstick film where the two artists perform a duet reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy — a humor transpires from the relationship between both protagonists. Taking the fate of the fez — an Ottoman headgear — as a stereotypical sign of the now-defunct empire, Oriental Dream depicts a staged chase between the two (one wears a fez) that takes place through the maze-like cobblestoned allies of Sarajevo, parodying the oddities of the East /West divide. Michael Blum (b. 1966, Jerusalem) is an artist based in Vienna and Montreal. His work aims at critically rereading the production of culture, myths, and history. Recent projects include Cape Town – Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo), Mobile Art Production, Stockholm (2007), Exodus 2048, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008) and New Museum, New York (2009), Capri in Tangerang, ruangrupa, Jakarta (2011), and Faktories und Felder, Israeli Center for digital art, Holon (2012). He is a professor at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques, Université du Québec à Montréal. Damir Nikšić (b. 1970, Brezovo Polje) is a conceptual artist from Sarajevo, whose work in video, installation, and performance often addresses Orientalism in cultural and crosscultural psychology. His work has been exhibited in a variety of venues throughout Europe and the US, including the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo; National Museum of Montenegro, Cetinje; Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi; Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade; National Museum, Szczecin; National Gallery, Skopje; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto; Palazzo Papesse Centre for Contemporary Art, Siena; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Tallin Art Hall, Tallin; Locarno Film Festival, Locarno; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Sammlung Essl, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Palais and Lichtenstein Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; and the 50th Venice Biennale.

Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer, The Infinite Library, 2007 — ongoing

The Infinite Library is an ongoing project by Daniel Gustav Cramer (b. 1975, Neuss) and Haris Epaminonda (b. 1980, Nicosia) that begun in 2007. As an index, The Infinite Library recalls the Library of Babel by Borges. The books that the two artists compose are constituted of volumes that result out of different combinations and juxtapositions of existing books which, after being taken apart, are later joined together to create new volumes. The books now stand autonomously, not as narrative structures constructed by the flow of text, but as an associative system of imagery and intuitive conceptions. Haris Epaminonda (b. 1980, Nicosia) lives and works in Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main (2011), and Tate Modern, London (2010). She has participated in the Bucharest Biennale (2012) and the New Museum Triennial (2009) as well as the Berlin Biennale (2008), and represented Cyprus at the Biennale di Venezia (2007). Daniel Gustav Cramer (b. 1975, Neuss) lives in Berlin and studied at the Royal College of Art, London. He has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Glarus (2012) and the Kunstverein Dortmund (2010). Cramer has participated in group exhibitions at the Nouveau Museé National de Monaco (2012), Kunstmuseum Bochum (2010), and

the Stiftung Schloss Moyland (2010), as well as the Athens Biennale (2009) and Jerwood Space, London (2005).

Chris Curreri & Luis Jacob The Thing, 2008

Chris Curreri’s (b. 1978, Toronto) work in photography, film, and sculpture is premised on the idea that things in the world are not defined by essential properties, but rather by the actual relationships that we establish with them. Luis Jacob (b. 1971, Lima) is an artist, curator, and writer who addresses issues of social interaction and the subjec tivity of aesthetic experience. Produced collaboratively by Curreri and Jacob, The Thing (2008) is a suite of three photographs that depict a figure in series of enigmatic poses. The figure’s features are obscured behind a reflective membrane that entirely covers its face and body. Shut inside itself without eyes or a mouth, the figure contorts its body into forms that approach abstraction, as it contends with its impermeable but elastic borders. The Thing

is the figure of an intense, even traumatic, alterity that makes a claim upon the viewer, who is called to construct a relationship to it. This relationship may well be founded on a fundamental misrecognition — one that The Thing endures passively, almost stoically, but nonetheless poignantly. Luis Jacob (b. 1971, Lima) Working in Toronto, Canada as artist, curator and writer, Luis Jacob’s diverse practice addresses issues of social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Recent solo exhibitions include A Finger in the Pie, A Foot in the Door, A Leg in Quicksand, Kunsthalle Lingen (2012); Pictures at an Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011); Tableaux Vivants, Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2010); 7 Pictures of Nothing Repeated Four Times, in Gratitude, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); and Habitat, Kunstverein Hamburg, (2008). Group exhibitions include Animism, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video /Performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); If We Can’t Get It Together, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007). Chris Curreri (b. 1978, Toronto) works with film, photography and sculpture. His work is premised on the idea that things in the world are not defined by essential properties, but rather by the actual relationships that we establish with them. Recent exhibitions include: Beside Myself at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2011); Something Something at the University of Toronto Art Center (2011); An Unpardonable Sin at castillo/corrales, Paris (2010); and Perceptions and their Arousal at the Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston (2008). Recent film screenings include: Image Forum Festival, Japan; Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata, Argentina; and the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.

L’ Age d’ Or – I Wanna Be Injured (1986 – present), which embodies the processes of their collaborative practice.

Presented here, on the 3rd floor, is a publication that shows a series of ten exercises, compiled in ten chapters, which progress in levels from basic to difficult. The whole set of exercises lasts for thirty minutes.

L’ Age d’ Or – I Wanna Be Injured is the video documentation of a series of seven performances in which Danny Devos inflicts violence on himself. Similar to a ritual, each performance is held on a site perceived as ‘magical’ by the duo. Anne-Mie van Kerck hoven states: “When visiting Corbion, where you can see the remains of the little cottage where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived together for a short while, I asked Danny to lay down naked on his stomach with his legs open. A piece of wood was tied between his ankles, and his hands tied behind his back: A secret performance to pay homage to the time we met seven years ago, when he did the performance I wanna be injured at the end of my installation = Basic at Art Something, Amsterdam. I shot a three-minute Super 8 movie of Danny’s performance, with no editing afterwards, only the energy of the location and the secrecy of the event defined my action. We decided to do the same thing in other ritual spots we visit together.”

MadeIn Company Physique of Consciousness, 2011

Please also see [05], on p.16. 21

Club Moral Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK) & Danny Devos (DDV) L’ Age d’ Or – I Wanna Be Injured, 1986 — present

Club Moral is an Antwerp-based noise band that was formed in 1981 by Danny Devos (b. 1959, Vilvoorde) and Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp). Between 1981 and 1987, Club Moral acted as both a venue and performance band, hosting numerous exhibitions, performances, concerts, lectures, and film screenings beyond the reach of mainstream culture. Club Moral is known for its controversial performances and image production, and for this exhibition presents

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp) has been prolific in her output of drawings, other works on paper and synthetic material, as well as short videos and computer animations, since the late nineteen seventies. A straightforward tone pervades in all her work, in which the erotic meets machine-fetishism. Text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven's proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics. She is fascinated by the kinetic power of every language. Her work connects different knowledge systems, investigates the areas of the subconscious, and looks at moral aberrations from a female point of view. She works with Zeno X Gallery, Antwerpen and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. During the last 30 years her work has been shown in Europe, Asia, and the USA, here she also lectured and performed. In 2008 she had an expo in Wiels Brussels, Kunstmuseum Luzern (CH) and

Manifesta (I). In 2009 in Kunsthalle Nurnberg (D) and Carquefou Nantes (F). More recently in The Renaissance Society in Chicago, USA (2011) and Mu.ZEE in Oostende, Belgium (2012). Danny Devos (b. 1959, Vilvoorde) Since 1979: one hundred and sixty performances in forty-six cities in twelve countries; twenty-three personal exhibitions in thirteen cities in seven countries; one hundred group exhibitions in thirty cities in nine countries; two hundred twentynine articles in seventy-four magazines and newspapers; fifty-nine catalogues by forty-seven publishers; twentythree projects on clubmoral.com; full catalogue on performan.org; thirty-six videos on YouTube.com; sixteen dj-sets on podomatic.com; seven hundred and thirty posts on wheniwasbuyingyouadrinkwherewereyou.blogspot.com; five hundred and fifty-five posts on theyeshavit.blogspot.com; two hundred and forty-six posts on theartistsbookshelf. blogspot.com; two hundred and eleven posts on onkawaraisnotdead.blogspot.com; thirty-three posts on stakeholderddv.blogspot.com; four pages and three applications on facebook.com; one email address.

Oscar Tuazon My Flesh to Your Bare Bones, 2010

Predominantly a sculptor, Oscar Tuazon (b. 1975, Seattle) is not merely interested in the possibility of structural failure but wants to make such failure present in the work, palpable, real. He follows intuitively the disruptive impact his sculptures have on the space around them — how they literally eat space.

Oscar Tuazon’s sound piece My Flesh to Your Bare Bones (2010) was born in response to Vito Acconci’s “Antarctica of the Mind” (2004). The latter, an unrealized proposal for Halley II Research Station (a British facility in Antarctica which was buried — as the first four Halley Research Stations — by snow accumulation until it was inhabitable), is the description of a building that exists only as a text, and, thus, only in our imagination. Tuazon’s My Flesh to Your Bare Bones includes an audio recording of Acconci reading from “Antarctica of the Mind” in which he says: “Imagine this world as a white sheet of paper”. Michael Blum & Damir Nikšić, Oriental Dream, 2010. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Tuazon has composed his own written score that plays simultaneously with Acconci’s: the two voices echo and overlay, reverberating a duet within the gallery walls. Tuazon’s voice explains his working process, inducing a tempo of survival and vitality: “I feel a chill and then I move it. I kick at it and slip on it. I scratch a line out and spit on it. I spent a night out there, I spent some time out there. I went out there and spent a night out there, I don’t know where. The light died out while I walked and so I stopped. […] I want to get inside my body and get carried in it, I’d like to get buried in it, put my head in it and get in it, I’m not scared of it. I’m walking as I write this.” Oscar Tuazon (b. 1975, Seattle) lives and works in Paris. Recently his work has been showed at Whitney Biennial 2012; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Power Station, Dallas; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; CAPC Bordeaux; Palais de Tokyo and the 54th Venice Biennial.

Falke Pisano & Ana Roldan, Dynamo, 2008 – 2012 and Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Left hand, Right Hand, 2006. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Spatial Design Studio Miessen 26.04.12 — 06.01.13

Witte de With’s Defne Ayas invited the Berlin-based collaborative agency Studio Miessen to analyze the unique building of Witte de With, devise a series of spacespecific interventions throughout the building, and re-develop its street-level presence.

Installation view 2nd floor Witte de With. Courtesy Studio Miessen. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Taking its cue from the history of Witte de With’s building, originally erected as a girls’ school in 1875, and later renovated into a technical school in the 1970’s, the Berlinbased collaborative agency Studio Miessen has developed a multitude of reflexive spaces that punctually intervene and activate specific areas across this 19th century construction. Through these interventions, spread over two floors and at the entrance, a space has been created that reflects the structures used in the educational system to structure an open and flexible space. On the first floor, visitors will occasionally encounter the Consensus Bar, a temporal dark space that functions as a shared space for social gatherings and events. Furnished with simple wood bench structures and a white fading smoke ceiling that rejuvenates every hour, the space echoes the structure of a hidden apse. Playing with the historical relationship between religious structures and educational systems, the room’s atmosphere is eerily similar to a religious setting for sacrilege and profanity. The space is shared with Rotterdam-based TENT.

Installation view 2nd floor Witte de With. Courtesy Studio Miessen. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Continuing the journey up into the exhibition floor, the visitor encounters two main spaces divided by the new reception front. In the first main space stands a multi-purpose yellow monolith. This giant modular cube consisting of sixty-four separate blocks constantly mutates in accordance to a series of events

taking place in 2012, including Singh’s Causeries. This educational rehearsal space is wrapped by a grey blackboard stripe painted on the wall. The second space houses a massive bleacher covered with AstroTurf, a synthetic field grass. Underneath this structure, an archival space containing publications and video displays has been built, producing an environment that feels simultaneously public and hidden. The back of the room also contains a reading table that allows visitors to have a more intimate experience with Singh’s work. Both spaces were configured to allow different activities to occur alongside The Humans, Alexander Singh’s production in progress. Drawing upon both the historical identity of the building as an educational institution and keeping in mind the conceptual framework of the exhibition and future events, the spaces are arranged to reflect the complex relationship between an art work and the specific environment in which it is contained. These new settings provide a tailored, yet open platform to stage and host discursive events, bringing the many different artists and projects closer to the audience and offering a versatile means to reflect on artistic creation. Additionally, the redesigned entrance invites visitors into the new foyer, which utilizes the new identity of the Witte de With design by APFEL (A Practice for Everyday Life). A wall mounted grey metal structure announces the constant programmatic changes, offering different possibilities of display with mobile and interchangeable panels, and elicits an ephemeral and ever-changing condition. 35

Previously at Witte de With

Prompts & Triggers Blueprints, 2012, Qiu Zhijie 蓝图, 2012, 邱志杰 28.06.12 — 19.08.12

Prompts & Triggers : Line No. 2 (Holy Bible) Meriç Algün Ringborg 26.04.12 — 17.01.12

veryone for E Themselves – Discussing the ethics and economics of art Symposium 12.05.12 37

Prompts & Triggers Blueprints, 2012, Qiu Zhijie 蓝图, 2012, 邱志杰 28.06.12 — 19.08.12 Artist Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰; b. 1969, Fujian, China) draws from major political and historical narratives to produce large-scale ink-based maps and diagrams. From Confucianism to Enlightenment, Qiu Zhijie charts new paths, centers, nodes and relationships, scrutinizing the mutable boundaries that outline histories of world thought.

Qiu Zhijie, Blueprints. Installation view. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Qiu Zhijie developed these series of mappings of the contemporary world based on several concepts that are summarized in the following maps: Map of 21st century; Map of Utopia; Map of Total Art; Map of Chinese History; Map of Nanjing Yangzi River and Map of Spirit Renew. About Qiu Zhijie Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969, Zhangzhou, China) lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou, China. Qiu’s diverse practice embraces sculpture, painting, printmaking, video, photography, and performance. His work, which frequently translates traditional techniques into conceptual forms, examines the intersection between political history and current social realities in China. Qiu has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2010); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2009); Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai (2008); Long March Space, Beijing (2007); Fundação Oriente, Macau, China (2000); and Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (1999). Group shows featuring Qiu’s work include Community of Tastes: Chinese Contemporary Art Since 2000, Museu de arte contemporânea da universidade de São Paulo (2011); Photography from the New China, Getty Center, Los Angeles (2010–11); Shanghai Biennial (2010); Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).

Shanghai Biennale Curatorial Presentation Thursday 28 June 2012, 6pm Following an introduction by Qiu Zhijie, artist and the Artistic Director of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, this event brings together select curators of participating City Pavilions to discuss and make transparent their thoughts on the framework of the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Participants include Defne Ayas (Director, Witte de With), Laura Barreca (Researcher at the University of Studies of Palermo and independent curator), Chris Fitzpatrick (Director, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerpen), Henk Slager (Head of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design), Davide Quadrio (Director, Arthub Asia), with Charles Esche (Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) as a respondent.

Qiu Zhijie, Blueprints. Map of Reactivation. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Qiu Zhijie: Many worlds redrawn Christina Li

Qiu Zhijie, Blueprints. Installation view. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

As one steps into Blueprints, Qiu Zhijie’s first solo presentation in the Netherlands at Witte de With, the visitor is immediately confronted with a five-meter long hand drawn map, Map of Total Art. This map forms the crux of Qiu’s long term investigation under a myriad of identities – as an artist, teacher, cultural archaeologist, curator, and thinker – bringing forth the concept of ‘total art’ as an artistic practice rooted on a cultural research that forms the basis for bettering mankind and the world we collectively inhabit 1. The exhibition is a multi-farious presentation of atlases of philosophy and world thought, drawn from major political and historical narratives, and set alongside specific maps charting recent critical sociological observations and phe-nomena of China’s burgeoning economy and experiences with modernization. These inkbased wall maps provide a glimpse into Qiu’s thought processes, influences, intellectual foundation as well as his continued interest in calligraphy, which have informed his work in recent years. Certain featured maps, Map of 21st Century, Map of Utopia, Map of Total Art, Map of Chinese History, and Map of Reactivation, do not only offer a summary from Qiu’s view on the development and genealogy of ideas that form our contemporary world, but also serve as cornerstones for the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Operating under the central theme of “Reactivation”, the 9th Shanghai Biennale emphasizes (art) education as a space of energy generation as well as a motivational

Qiu Zhijie, Blueprints. Installation view. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

1 Qiu Zhijie is a professor at the School of Inter-media Art, the Director of Total Art Studio and member of the supervisor team in the Art and Social Thoughts Institute oat the China Art Academy, Beijing.

force for social transformation. As one of the co-curators of the Biennale (together with Boris Groys, Jens Hoffman, and Johnson Chang), Qiu has employed Map of Reactivation as his visual essay, represented through droves of pipes, boilers (Boiler of Reform), respiratory and digestive systems (marked with terms like Redigestion, Collage, Filter and Learn) and mountain ridges (with nodes such as Education, Depletion, Creativity). This map is presented alongside Map of the City — the map of a historical tourist city, based on Amsterdam; Map of the Academy — a map of inquisitive learning spaces and concepts surrounding unconventional forms of learning; and Map of Inter-city Pavilion — a globe marking the selected cities, e.g. Istanbul, Shanghai, Palermo, Antwerp, Berlin, Auckland, and Bandung, among others, taking part of the guest curated city pavilions. All of these maps underpin the different forms and models that are taken into a collective en-visioning of the exploration of the biennale theme, with particular interest in the process of shared, horizontal knowledge production and a proposition to apprehend our world through the microcosms of cities, rather than in terms of nation states and national identity. These maps function as blueprints of an ongoing desire to inject reinvigorated possibilities in the consideration of the ways in which a biennale exhibition’s architecture could be founded upon collective debate and individual contributions, where research and artistic practice co-exist and create cross pollinations within the framework of “Reactivation”. The featured maps in Blueprints contain complex universes of thought with the intent to establish a renewed understanding 41

of how to view the world at present, where terms, concepts and political, philosophical cultural and religious ideologies originating from Europe and Asia occupy and enter the same mapped plane. By proposing a shift beyond long standing fixed opinions and juxtaposing seemingly different conceptions, both historically and culturally, Qiu’s maps create a new opening in which we can contemplate on our relationship with history and the world, outside of the East-West divide. In the case of the Map of Total Art, a map that summarizes Qiu’s philosophy of artistic thinking and education, unprecedented linkages and leaps are made through the associations with Taoist philosophies which compliment Duchampian and Beuysian ideas of art, as well as media theories challenging and breaking past the clearly defined academic disciplines of Chinese and Western schools of art historical education. The use of layering in Qiu’s maps, a technique used in taking abstracted information to weave into a complex fabric of relations without a focal point, hierarchical structure or single organization, 2 allows for open or hybrid interpretations. A new genealogy of ideas is formed by the way in which the information is laid out in coinciding forms of thoughts from different origins or times, while the multiplicity of reality is always taken into account. These ideas are transformed into bookmarks and jumping stones, and when the maps are read according to each visitor’s selective interaction, they help to draw out manifold open-ended destinations and new readings. 2 James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In Denis Cosgrove, (red.) Mappings, London: 1999. p.235

Qiu Zhijie’s artistic practice is deeply intertwined with a dedication to socio-cultural research to gain insight on the everchanging country of China, as seen through his projects, “Why Go to Tibet – Survey of Tibetan Subject Matter in Painting” in 2007, and “Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi – A Suicidology of The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge” in 2008, which is translated into and presented as the wall drawing Map of Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in the exhibition. The numerous issues and problems that have emerged from the ongoing transformations of modern China, are presented through the metaphor of a dam and river bridge of Nanjing. This bridge was the first double-track highway and railway bridge constructed solely by Chinese companies, which on the one hand makes it a national landmark, yet on the other hand a site for the world’s highest reported number of suicides. Thus frictions are revealed between national pride and individual turmoil in the country against the backdrop of China’s steadily progressing contemporary society. Terminology such as Mental Health, Suicide Prevention, Destroyed Countryside, Return Home, Optimization, and Industrialization, indicate common experiences that the contemporary migrant worker is going through, while trying to cope with the expectations and frustrations of everyday life. Nonetheless, as in many of his maps, Qiu offers salve to offset the negative, destructive and seemingly despondent facts, where friendship and temporary withdrawal offer important regeneration for contemporary subjects. In this case, he mentions sites such as Mount Philosophy, Academy of Total Art and the Pagoda of Think It Over, as moments of philosophical reflection and psychological assuagement. Qiu Zhijie, Map of Utopia [detail], 2012. Courtesy the artist.

The Making of Blueprints

Qiu’s lenses are also cast onto a different location of China. Shanghai, the home city of the upcoming Biennale, which is another site of Qiu’s miniature sociological research, and is encapsulated within Map of Sun Yatsen Park. Forming an image at odds with the Map of Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, this map of the city park in Shanghai sketches a Chinese society populated by young citizens, middle-class families, foreign expatriate workers and elderly members. This rather different cross section of China’s society all gather in the park that functions both as a public arena as well as a space of leisure. It is precisely this space of leisure, artificial nature and cultural consumerism, that presents the tensions between the pace of development and the perception of Chinese tradition and culture. These tensions evidently manifest through the uncanny coexistence of western holiday landmarks alongside ancient tombs, tea houses, Qigong and Tai chi classes separated for cancer patients and foreigners, speakers’ corners, lottery of world cultural heritage festival, and the ubiquitous contemporary art museum. The conglomeration of activities conjures an image of a confident, contemporary Chinese society, heralded under the four different zones designated by Qiu: the Transformation of Family to Country, Birth of Leisure, Birth of Landscape and Rebirth of the Society. Only near the edge of this map, one can see the instances of dissonance within the fast-paced society, illustrated with ideas of the Birth of Wilderness, the Lost Natural Historian, or the Hometown of the Plant, which all symbolize society’s increasing dislocation and disinterest with nature and simultaneously function as a subtle reminder of the boundaries of the world that Qiu has

knowingly chosen to present to us in this series of maps. In an eloquent manner, the exhibition Blueprints has assembled sprawling links and nodes of both Eastern and Western intellectual thought, carefully avoiding simplified notions of universalism and maintaining a delicate balance between his subjective understanding of the world and present-day China. As we witness the transformation of modern China through industrialization and rural urban migration to the rise of the leisure class, one cannot help but draw similar comparisons to pathways that have been experienced by Western countries in the 19th Century. However it seems increasingly irrelevant to speculate whether China, and other countries, will follow the path of the Western countries, which at present are markedly undergoing an existential crisis. Qiu’s inquisitive attitude towards knowledge, and his organic intermingling of schools of thought and disciplines, might provide us with new insights as he reinvigorates existing ideas and questions how to chart our world as human beings. About Christina Li Christina Li is an independent curator and writer based in Hong Kong and The Netherlands. Until recently, she was involved with the research and project management of the FORMER WEST project. Li was responsible for the debut of SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte, Amsterdam)'s public programme: Actors, Agents and Attendants: Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility and curating the accompanying artist projects and film programme. She has previously worked as a Curator of Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong) , and was the assistant curator of Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities and Dreams, the Hong Kong Participation of the 53rd Venice Biennale. She graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in Fine Arts (Art History) and Comparative Literature and completed de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2009.

Photography Erwin Nederhoff

Prompts & Triggers : Line No. 2 (Holy Bible) Meriç Algün Ringborg 26.04.12 — 17.01.12

Meriç Algün Ringborg, Line No. 2 (Holy Bible), (2012). Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Meriç Algün Ringborg (b. 1983, Istanbul, lives and works in Stockholm) presents a seemingly simple horizontal line, consisting of scriptures from the Holy Bible, that courses through Witte de With’s exhibition space. Perhaps the most unexpected point of departure for Line No.2 (Holy Bible) is Alexander Selkirk who is known as the original Robinson Crusoe, the central protagonist in Daniel Defoe’s fictional yet biographical novel first published in 1719. Algün Ringborg’s work presents the Holy Bible as a symbol for self-control as it appeared in Selkirk and Crusoe’s stories, further stipulating on the role of religion throughout history. About Meriç Algün Ringborg Meriç Algün Ringborg (b. 1983, Istanbul) is a visual artist living and working in Stockholm. She received her BA from Sabanci University, Istanbul in Visual Arts (2007) and MFA from Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2012). Recent exhibitions include: When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2012); An Incomplete History of Incomplete Works of Art, Francesca Minini, Milan (2012); Show Off in Malmö Konsthall and Point CCA, Nicosia (2012); The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms in Gävle Konstcentrum (2012); Germans, Speak German!, CCA, Glasgow (2012); Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)(2011); Danföredanföredanföredan, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2010); Qui Vive? The 2nd International Moscow Biennale for Young Art (2010) and the solo exhibition The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms (2010).

Meriç Algün Ringborg, Line No. 2 (Holy Bible), (2012). Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Q&A with Meriç Algün Ringborg

What is it that you have found so fascinating in the relationship between Selkirk, Crusoe, and the Bible? When I first started reading about Selkirk, I was immediately drawn to the fact that the only book he had when he was marooned on ‘his’ island was the Bible. It was the only book he had to read for four years and four months, and within the shores of his isolation it spurred an immense personal transformation. Daniel Defoe, in turn, based his character Crusoe on Selkirk’s story, which he had heard from Woodes Rogers, the captain of the ship that saved Selkirk from his island. This transformation of stories as they are being told and retold and the meanings that are lost and found is similar to how religious texts were written and interpreted historically, as well as today. I wanted to work with this relationship by way of transforming the Bible itself into an inescapable horizontal line. Could you talk more about the special role that the Bible plays in the life of Selkirk and also Robinson Crusoe? Selkirk is said to have been a very bad mannered person before he ended up on the island — apparently this was the reason he was thrown off the ship he was sailing with in the first place. After years of being alone, he is said however to have become a better man. Indeed, one could presume, since it was his only resource, that the Bible caused this shift, but there are also accounts that Selkirk simply used the Bible, not as a religious text but as any text, and read it out loud to himself to maintain his command of language. With Crusoe it is a different story. Defoe made him a religious man before he 48

became a castaway. But, actually, the most significant difference from Selkirk is that Crusoe was not alone: he had his companion Friday, who, in a defining moment of ‘triumph,’ he converts to Christianity. With Selkirk it is an individual experience of the Bible that’s muddled by varied, conflicting accounts, but in Robinson Crusoe the didactic and authoritative use of this text becomes more visible. Why did you choose to work with the King James Version of the Bible? All the biblical quotations in Robinson Crusoe came from the King James Bible of 1611. This version was the third English translation, and it is basically the most common and accepted one in a contemporary sense. If you look at a translation time-line of the Bible, this version was when its language becomes more consistent. For instance, the King James Bible was to solve all the translation problems that were foreseen by the Puritans. As a matter of fact, Daniel Defoe was a Puritan, thus also the character of Robinson Crusoe. How would you connect this to today, if at all? One example could be the particular role that scriptures written centuries ago have in contemporary politics. To illustrate this contemporary influence, one can look at how, just a few years ago, each daily report prepared for President George W. Bush included a quote from the Bible. At the time, many of the reports focused on the war in Iraq and the rise of casualties in the region. One of the quotes used was: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when

the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” The use of a quote such as this infers that there is something very powerful surrounding us, something that we cannot escape. In my work, one effect of the text being visibly skewed is that a viewer cannot stand properly. Here, you are confronted by something that is manipu lating you — your body as well as your mind. The character of Crusoe still shapes the minds of many. The idea of being marooned, alone on an island. What kind of thoughts does it promulgate about civilization at large? The idea of being isolated on an island has been around for centuries, but it of course has different connotations in different periods. Today, deserted islands are linked with ideas of paradise, of some sort of carefree utopia, whilst in a practical sense it is in fact undeniably unrealistic. The idea of being that isolated actually terrifies most people, including me, but I think people are drawn to fantasizing about being deserted on an island, especially when one is fed up with society in general. The aspect of solitary escape is for instance something the travel industry uses to make us want to go to wherever it is they want us to go. Also, considering rather recent technologies, such as emails, mobile phones, social networking sites and other means of connectivity — of being perpetually contactable — perhaps there is also an increase in the fantasy of opting out, of disappearing to a secluded place, either on vacation (where you won’t really be alone unless you somehow purchased your own island) or forever. And, at the same time, we live in an era in which most places in the world are

populated, or at least have been ‘discovered’ and mapped. Our existence is getting smaller, there is nowhere to escape and hide — someone is always emailing or calling you and even if you tried to find somewhere to be alone, others would probably already be there. What tools and books would you want today if you were marooned? I wouldn’t want anything, or at least I would like to fool myself into thinking that I wouldn’t want anything. Tell me about the research you have done into the various linguistic transformations of the Bible. Line No.1 (Holy Bible) was first realized at Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, which is an institution in Stockholm with a relatively small exhibition space. When I was presented with the larger space at Witte de With, I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to incorporate different versions, different translations, different transformations of the Bible. From Aramaic to Hebrew and Greek to Latin to Old English to New English to many different languages of today… The Bible is the most distributed book of all time. In my opinion when you look at it in different versions the content dissolves and what becomes more apparent is the authoritative power of it.

veryone for Themselves – Discussing E the ethics and economics of art Symposium 12.05.12 What kind of conversations have you already encountered that have been trig gered by your work? The striking aspect in many conversations I have had with audiences was the sudden reference to personal experiences with the Bible or religion in a broader sense. It was truly interesting to hear how people have themselves encountered this book, and especially the contexts in which they have experienced it. For instance, some people knew the Bible only by way of its ubiquitous presence in Western art-history. This reveals how essential knowledge of the Bible is to the study of the history of Western art. Why have you embraced the line in your work? I find the line, by which I mean any line, quite enigmatic. It can be an image portraying something or representing information, whilst still being a line. The length of the line can be infinite, and it can almost be any width.

The line also divides and separates — either horizontally or vertically — and, as each side of the line becomes contextualized, it takes on the role of a kind of void space. In the case of Line No. 1 (Holy Bible), the line employs a particular aspect, which is due to its nature: it has the distinct psychological effect of coercing whomever is in the room to hold their body at its level, or below it. Wall-based borders such as these are frequently used in interrogation rooms and classrooms. To make people docile, an unassuming line is simply painted on a wall or manifested in another way. I wanted to couple the Bible, as an authoritative text, with such a gesture to explore what effects it might have alongin with the surrounding geographical territories of the islands Crusoe and Selkirk have lived on this specific context. Do you have any instructions for how the piece should be read? Not really.

Photography Francine Blokland

Unpacking social dilemmas Bik Van der Pol

In an interview with Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau in 1987, Belgian filmmaker Jef Cornelis talked about his ‘dropping out’ from the art world in 1972 1. In his view, Documenta V, which was staged that same year, marked the beginning of the commercialization of the art world and the breakthrough, in his words, of a mentality of ‘every man for himself’. It is not said outright, but from that interview one may suppose that Documenta V was the reason — though perhaps not the only one — that he radically turned away from the art world. In his perception, this Documenta, curated by Harald Szeemann (who also transformed Documenta into the 100-day ‘event’ as we know it today) marked a decisive moment; the marketing and the spectacle of art hit its first peak there. Documenta started just after the Second World War. It was conceived as an ideological exhibition that would show the world how art was made in the West, and how art flourishes in a free world. In this sense, Documenta provides not only a five-year overview of the newest art practices and expressions, but functions as a clear political instrument as well; it shows the state of affairs in the free world through art. However, in his films Documenta IV and Documenta V 2— which were shown on the VRT, the Dutch-language Belgian public 1 See: http://jefcornelis.janvaneyck.nl/interview_05.php 2 Both films have been brought into distribution again recently by JRP Ringier (www.jrp-ringier.com) 3 From: I was too curious to hand everything over to the artists Interview with Jef Cornelis on his film for television, Sonsbeek buiten de perken, 1971, and other films on major art events, by Koen Brams & Dirk Pültau, http://jefcornelis.janvaneyck.nl/ interview_03.php] 4 The film can be seen on UbuWeb, ww.ubu.com/film/serra.html

broadcasting station on respectively August 13, 1968, and July 28, 1972 3 (why is it so hard to imagine such a thing happening today?) Cornelis shows that other factors than just ‘good art’ play a role in the decision of who and what will be shown; choices for which artist to show where, and how much space an artwork should get in the context of the wider exhibition-design was, and is, never value-free but guided by, among other factors, capital, social relationships, and political dynamics. Documenta is a barometer, the Olympic games of the art world. And as with the Olympics, this vast show also involves all kinds of — sometimes problematic — relationships that are not immediately visible on the surface: the influence of capital in the contemporary art world, and the role that ethics plays behind the scenes of institutions and events like Documenta, biennales and art fairs. There is a lot at stake. From here, it seems productive to make a jump to Prisoner’s Dilemma, a film by artist Richard Serra and made in 1974 4. This film is a role-play for television featuring some major players in the New York art world of the 1970s — among them one of the most powerful gallerists of the time, Leo Castelli — and is based on experiments from Game Theory. Prisoner’s Dilemma is about choices and consequences, about the choice between collaboration or betrayal. It looks at why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. The Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a method developed in the 1950s by game theorists working for U.S. neo-conservative think tank, the RAND corporation, and is still applied today in social research to observe social relations and dilemmas in order to

draw possible conclusions with respect to conduct and human behavior, which can be used again in other domains such as politics and economics. Many natural processes have been abstracted into models in which living beings are engaged in endless games of Prisoner’s Dilemmas, and this widespread applicability gives the game its importance. The Prisoner’s Dilemma looks suspiciously like the current political situation in the Netherlands and internationally. It is Prisoners’ Dilemmas all over. Is it better in times of crisis to collaborate or to go for quick profit? Is it better to keep silent when being hit, or to strike back? How does the current financial crisis affect our choices, our ethical frameworks? To what extent do ‘power players’ direct decisions in the art world and in the world of politics, our perceptions? These questions constitute the social dilemma of today, and the ‘natural reflex’ suggested by the Prisoner’s Dilemma seems to be that the players are stuck in rational behavior. We may have arrived at a ‘turning point’. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, for example, suggested ways of circumnavigating the game’s structures by changing the rules: she has pointed out the dangers of easy adaptation of the game so much as how one can go about adapting it for collective benefit 5: “People are trapped 5 Ostrom, Elinor, Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. See: http://www.cooperationcommons. com/node/361 6 E veryone for Themselves – Discussing the ethics and economics of art, a day-long symposium which took place on 12 May 2012 and also included in the preceding week a series of homework screenings and workshops. Everyone for Themselves was organized in collaboration with artist Jan van de Pavert, and Liesbeth Levy (program director De Unie) and Defne Ayas (director Witte de With).

by the Prisoner’s Dilemma only if they treat themselves as prisoners by passively accepting the suboptimum strategy the dilemma locks them into, but if they try to work out a contract with the other players, or find the ones most likely to cooperate, or agree on rules for punishing cheaters, or artificially change the incentive ratios — they can create an institution for collective action that benefits them all.” But this is easier said than done. especially when it comes to conflicting social interests and defining wherein lies the collectivity in the common good. Ostrom suggests that social dilemmas of multiple dimensions are obstacles to creating institutions for collective action, and that these dilemmas must be overcome if these institutions are to succeed or exist at all, and she points out that lack of information can be an obstacle to agreement. However, Ostrom’s inquiries focus mainly on natural resources, while leaving aside other forms of common property, such as knowledge and culture — fundamental properties of democracy — that are very much under assault today through increasing privatization. These forms of common good are as precarious and contested as natural resources, and their insidious loss creates exclusion, privileged access and disinformation, instead of a situation where ‘publicly owned’ and ‘publicly accessible’ are considered indispensable achievements. The gains and losses that come with these new circumstances need to be dealt with, and it is here that politics comes in. The project ‘Everyone for Themselves’ 6 is an attempt to deal with these issues. It has a strong investigative and public character: 53

homework week, workshop and symposium. It is perhaps a bit ‘academic’ but simple and definitive answers are impossible; it is urgent to gather information from different sources. It is not only a symposium but also a generous sharing of investigations through film, documentary, reading material and a workshop. Altogether this allows for insight into the issues that not only made the research and background material available, it also aims to create an informed public, and an informed public may be the basis for overcoming the social dilemmas, through — eventually — institutions for collective action that are built by overcoming known obstacles. There is an urgency that has a clear collective interest. Willem Schinkel, a sociologist based in Rotterdam, in his recently-published book The New Democracy, describes what we witness today as follows: “… through a new economic crisis, a system committed fully to the capitalist political, is gradually eating away the legs of potentially subversive sectors such as art and science, but also, and above all the legs of the wider possibilities of critical solidarity. That — more than the simple preservation of an always arbitrary subsidy, with all the potential decadent consequences — is what is actually at stake, with the already partly implemented cuts to arts and culture.” 7 Isabelle Graw, meanwhile, calls for a critical voice in the current crisis 8: “Critique has the ability to raise objections, develop noneconomic criteria of assessment, and insist 7 Schinkel, Willem, De nieuwe democratie. Naar andere vormen van politiek, De Bezige Bij, 2012. 8 Graw, Isabelle, ‘In the grip of the market? On the relative heteronomy of art, the art world, and art criticism’, in: Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, eds. Olav Velthuis and Maria Lind, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 183 – 208.

on the possibility of a different social order. Critique means: reflection on the crisis. Just as crisis demands the decision of critique, critique aims at a crisis, by positively writing into its existence.” To start, we think it would be a good idea to create conditions for a certain energy and interaction to occur and build on, and to collectively share these energies in order to develop a vocabulary together to think around the questions that confront us today. We believe that creating ownership, gradually, through language — in other words, being able to talk and listen — may create new ways of thinking, and eventually acting. There is no other way. We, the public, artists, curators, writers, activists, have to actively involve ourselves in this endeavor. About Bik Van der Pol Liesbeth Bik (Haarlem, 1959) and Jos van der Pol (Arnhem, 1961) work collaboratively since 1995 as Bik Van der Pol. They live and work in Rotterdam. www.bikvanderpol.net

Editorial Team Defne Ayas, Amira Gad, Marjolein Geraedts Design A Practice for Everyday Life & Kristin Metho © 2012 Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art is supported by the City of Rotterdam and the Ministry of Culture.

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte de Withstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam The Netherlands

For information: T +31 (0)10 4110144 F +31 (0)10 4117924 info@wdw.nl www.wdw.nl