You are welcome to join us on the afternoon of Sunday, May 26th 2019 to the opening reception of the summer exhibitions program at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, which features:

Mariana Castillo Deball, a solo exhibition

This solo exhibition presents three distinct kinds of work—and worlds—created by Castillo Deball in the past decade. They strike a balance between material folds and unfolding ideas, whereby multiple senses of time are experienced in the blank spaces of a drawing, in the negative space of sculpture, or in the wrinkles of a surface. For years, Castillo Deball’s work has consistently manifested the ways in which the passage of time is illustrated, organized, and expressed in nature as much as in artifice.

Melike Kara, new work

For this first institutional presentation of her work in Europe, Melike Kara has created a new body of work, including a series of large works on canvas, as well as an installation of wooden sculptures intervened upon with paint and other materials. Of significant importance to Kara’s practice is the ongoing artistic exploration of her Kurdistan cultural background, guided by the understanding that knowledge is produced through rituals and oral histories, and that these processes lend new meanings to objects and encounters.

Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition

This exhibition brings together over a hundred works by the poet, visual artist, and activist Cecilia Vicuña. Since the 1960s, the artist has constituted a radical perspective on the relationship between art and politics through her writing and art making. For the exhibition organized by Witte de With and developed by guest curator Miguel A. López, a number of artworks, documents, and ephemera are presented for the first time.

Accompanying the exhibition is the publication Cecilia Vicuna: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure edited by López and published by Witte de With. It brings together new and existing essays on Vicuña’s work, and an anthology of diverse texts authored by the artist.

These exhibitions are organized by Witte de With’s director, Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy, and its team: Samuel Saelemakers, curator; Rosa de Graaf, associate curator; Wendy van Slagmaat-Bos, production officer. A series of public programs are organized in conjunction to the exhibitions. Please visit our calendar for more information.

A press pack with images for all exhibitions and biographies for all participating artists can be downloaded here. For press requests or for further information, please contact Jeroen Lavèn via [email protected] or call +31 10 411 01 44.