This publication brings together texts by Olad Ajiboy Bamgboy, an artist born in 1963 in Odu-Eku, Nigeria, and based since 1966 in London. Bamgboy's politically-driven work interweaves ethical and aesthetic concerns with remarkable care, dexterity and attention to process--and this goes for both his art and his critical writings, which bring a fresh, non-Western perspective to current debates about technology and culture. As Bamgboy puts it in his artist's statement: ''Central to my academic interests, teaching philosophy and artistic-critical framework is the need to make sense of culture and its complexities during the purported era of globalization. Equally necessary for my practice is a critical appraisal of technology as a culture that saturates our world, leading to its ascendance as a dominant discourse... I am interested in the possibilities for a critical art practice that is informed by the analysis of our cultural condition while avoiding the pitfalls of hypercynicism that can confine us within a framework that longs for an old reality.''

Writings On Technology And Culture

Arts & Photography

Marí, Bartomeu

History & Criticism

Witte de With Publishers

In 2001, Rotterdam and Porto, the cultural capitals of Europe for that year, were besieged by international artists invited to design projects that explored these two cities and their spaces. The singular nature of each work in Squatters led to their installation as cell-like structures of mini-exhibitions, staking a claim on their urban sites and creatively reconceiving them.

Squatters

Conventions In Contemporary Art arose from the highly entertaining and much-discussed series of debates organized by Witte de With in 2001. Without lapsing into dull theoryspeak, it explores and questions the routines and fashions that dominate the art world today. Catherine David and Iwona Blazwick explore the curator's heightened profile; Jeroen Boomgaard and Koen Brams tackle theory and art; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby question the relationship between design and art; Bart Lootsma and Camiel van Winkel look at art in public spaces; and Janneke Wesseling and Kitty Zijlmans discuss the position of non-western art in the western world.

Conventions in Contemporary Art: Lectures and Debates Witte de With 2001

Dunne, Anthony

Raby, Fiona

Lootsma, Bart

van Winkel, Camiel

Zijlmans, Kitty

Van Der Plas, Els

Murray, Alan.

Thissen, Siebe

Wesseling, Janneke

Brams, Koen

Huygens, Charlotte

Anonymous deserted buildings have dominated the photographic work of Efrat Shvily since she began to frame Israel's architecture in her images in the early 1990s. The buildings, so disconnected from their surroundings, point to the problematic relationship between the Israelis and their land. Shvily's New Homes in Israel and the Occupied Territories is a series of black-and-white photographs of houses and neighborhoods, which sometimes seem more like models than real buildings. In her desolate photos, Shvily does not make it clear whether the buildings were once inhabited and are now deserted, currently inhabited, or soon to be occupied. The series arose in reaction to the large number of new settlements that were realized in Israel in the 1990s. Perhaps because of the speed of these new developments, combined with the fact that construction projects are used as a means to occupy territory, the people who live in these places seem estranged from the land that surrounds them--a state of being that Shvily captures in her photos.

Efrat Shvily: New Homes In Israel And The Occupied Territories

Individual Artists

In three series of black-and-white pictures, Randa Shaath meets and photographs the people who live in Cairo, Egypt's capital city. Under the Same Sky--Rooftops of Cairo documents the lives of people who inhabit the rooftops of the city's apartments. Profiles portrays a variety of local citizens, including painters and writers, poets and dancers, film directors and parking lot attendants. And In the Heart of the Nile captures the lives of the farmers and fishermen who live on the island Qursaya in the Nile, where the river runs through the center of Cairo. This monograph by Randa Shaath is part of the publications series being developed parallel to the project Contemporary Arab Representations.

Randa Shaath: Under The Same Sky, Cairo

Through a series of discussions about an array of issues--battle simulation techniques and news programming, democracy and violence, the privatization of the military and militarized bodies--Jordan Crandall explores the organization and representation of contemporary armed conflict. Moderated by Crandall, Under Fire 1 is a compilation of a series of dialogues that occurred online from January 25 through April 19, 2004 between artists, political scientists, critics, activists and journalists around the central theme.

Jordan Crandall: Under Fire 1: The Organization and Representation of Violence

Ahmed, Akbar

Bayat, Asef

Armitage, John

Bishop, Ryan

These days, the term “reenactment” usually refers to live reconstructions of historic events, often of a military nature, performed by hobbyists. Civil War reenactments are the most popular in the United States, while European enthusiasts most often engage in recreations from the Napoleonic era. Visual art has its own versions. Recent years have brought many reenactments of historic performances from the 1960s and 1970s, works which otherwise would exist only in photos, videos, and text descriptions. But what exactly is being reenacted, and what is the effect of the representation? What meaning is resurrected out of this “doubling”? In the exhibition Life, Once More, contemporary works and texts by Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan and Barbara Visser reflect on these timely (and timeless) questions.

Life, Once More: Forms Of Reenactment In Contemporary Art (Performance Art)

Lütticken, Sven

Phelan, Peggy

Allen,Jennifer

Schaerf, Eran

Under Fire 2 is the second collection edited by Jordan Crandall in an ongoing project that explores the organization and representation of armed conflict. Emerging from online dialogues among a group of artists, theorists, scientists, critics, activists and journalists during three months of 2004 and reorganized thematically, the discussions in Under Fire 2 aim to offer new insights into symptomatic violence. The book covers issues such as the privatization of the military and the contributions of commercial and independent news media, as well as representations from artistic, literary and popular entertainment sources, to our cultural perception of conflict. Rather than relying on discourses based on Western conceptions of modernity, the project is dedicated to opening up new historical perspectives, exploring the potential of Islamist points of view as sources of critical and political debate.

Jordan Crandall: Under Fire 2: The Organization and Representation of Violence

The UK-based American artist Margaret Salmon creates stylized filmic portraits that weave together poetry and documentary. This illustrated reader contains an interview with the artist, an essay on Salmon's films, a short story by Raymond Carver and an historic look at Italian Neorealism by film critic André Bazin, reprinted from his seminal What is Cinema?.

Margaret Salmon

Humor & Entertainment

Over the past decade, Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer has developed a performative, narrative approach to installation--combining video, drawing and improvisatory sculpture. The works evolve over the course of an exhibition or transform drastically from one site to another, lending instability to the notion of what an artwork, or exhibition, might be.

Geoffrey Farmer (Source Book)

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Davila, Thierry

Desclaux, Vanessa

Farmer, Geoffrey

Gray, Zoë

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Books by Witte de With Publishers