Massive Artwork Stolen from Witte de With Facade in Rotterdam

Written by Nicolaus Schafhausen Saturday, 21 April 2012 22:56

ROTTERDAM, NL - Staff at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, are baffled by the mystery that unfolded yesterday, when an artwork measuring 30 x 11 meters disappeared from its façade. Yesterday, as the first artwork, "The Feast of Trimalchio" by Russian artist group AES+F was being removed from the building, the massive artwork was stolen from the pavement. Workmen were busy installing the second artwork, an image of the late Michael Jackson signed by German artist Isa Genzken, when the work mysteriously disappeared.

"Between You and I" is a year-long collaboration between Witte de With and SKOR which presents four massive artworks mounted as billboard-sized banners on its building (located on Rotterdam's cultural artery, the Witte de Withstraat). It is part of Witte de With's ongoing Morality project, that sees a range of activities taking place inside and outside the art center, including two exhibitions that open this Friday.

Witte de With's director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, expressed his amazement that such a theft could take place in broad daylight, given the size and weight of the canvas. The artists have been informed and police are now searching for a banner the size of a small playground.

The ongoing Morality project 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.

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