Kunstinstituut Melly

Morality

10 Oct 2009 - 30 Jun 2010

MORALITY
Fall 2009 – Summer 2010

Friday 9 October 2009, 6-9 p.m., opening

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, is pleased to present Morality.

From the Fall of 2009 until the Summer of 2010, will be the leitmotiv for an assemblage of interconnected projects that have been divided into several acts. They include five interrelated group exhibitions featuring over fifty international artists, a symposium, a film cycle, a performance program, a web platform and a book. Parallel to this, Witte de With and SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) will commission four interventions on Witte de With’s façade. This multifaceted project will open in October 2009 and run until the summer of 2010.

Morality is a provocative theme, especially in a world that is now determined by the experiences of war, displacement, political and economic crises, the rise of religious stereotypes, and the radicalization of seemingly old doctrines and ideologies. Morality is also a broad subject that affects everybody in many different ways. From the bathroom to the parliament, there is a total field of social engagement in which morality functions without boundaries, between a set of abstract, intangible and general ideas. Morality is neither a base nor a superstructure, but a smooth network of influences that operates outside the law, governing both regulated and unregulated social spaces, and affecting daily lives in subtle, seductive, unexpected ways. Yet, there is not a unique or purely affirmative sense that one can give to this notion. A number of moral attitudes – often at odds with one another – inform the positions that, as political subjects, we assume vis-à-vis the events that take place in our world.
Seemingly simple, but also disturbingly difficult to grasp, morality is an ideal leitmotiv for a project that seeks to explore critical points of fragmentation in everyday life.
Rather than presenting statements that can be perceived as being right or wrong, good or evil, the project Morality will create a space for showing a wide range of attitudes that problematize a total conception of morality, focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes that shape common thinking and behavior.

The first acts of Morality start on October 9, 2009, with two opening exhibitions: Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View; Act II: From Love to Legal, the first intervention on Witte de With’s façade by AES+F, and the launch of the Morality web platform.

Curated by Juan A. Gaitan and Nicolaus Schafhausen

Press information:
For further information, email press@wdw.nl or call +31 (0)10 411 0144, or see www.wdw.nl
 

Tags: AES+F, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Nicolaus Schafhausen