Cecilia Vicuña / Melike Kara / Mariana Castillo Deball

Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition
This retrospective 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.

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. 

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.

Founded in 1990, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam was conceived as an art house with a mission to present and discuss the work created today by visual artists and cultural makers. The institution was originally named after its street, which, for its part, was named in 1871 after the seventeenth century naval officer Witte Corneliszoon de With. Recently, it has come to examine the origins of its name.