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4/9/2012

Surplus Authors

Witte de With, Rotterdam

curated by Defne Ayas together with Philippe Pirotte.

Outside of personal romance, collaboration is perhaps the most elemental form of politics—just consider how the term plays a hand in ideas as basic as “two heads are better than one” as well as in issues 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 at a time of 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 collaboration 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, Luis Jacob & Chris Curreri, Dora Garcia, 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.

The opening will be jointly hosted with TENT, who is opening the show Between The Map and The Territory on the same day, from 8 pm to 11 pm. This group show presents new works by Bik Van der Pol, Karin Hueber, Maaike Gouwenberg & Joris Lindhout, Anna Okrasko, Elian Somers and Emily Whitebread, and is curated by Mariette Dölle. The show is on view until 4 November 2012.. Read more

From 11pm onwards, after party in WORM, opposite Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and TENT.

About 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 – 17 June 2012, transformed the Bible itself into an inescapable datum. From 28 June– 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 collaboration 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.

Image: Michael Blum and Damir Niksic, still from Oriental Dream, video, 7 mn 30, 2010. Courtesy of the artists.1

Artist Talk: Work by Marianne Flotron, in discussion with Philippe Pirotte on Saturday 6 October 2012, 5 pm (presented in collaboration with the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam)
A lecture-performance: Assemblages (2010) by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato on Thursday 25 October 2012, 7pm

Opening: Wednesday 5 September, 5 – 10 pm

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (3rd Floor)
Witte de Withstraat 50 - 3012 BR Rotterdam
Opening hours
Tuesday through Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed on Mondays and during installation periods.

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