[WikiLeak - Kaupthing Claims, 2011, Rules Series. Gouache Wall Painting. Dimensions variable.] Short Big Drama – Angela Bulloch :: January 21 - April 9, 2012 :: Opening: January 20; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Short Big Drama highlights the theatricality of the artist’s practice. This comprehensive exhibition presents a wide selection of existing works together with specially commissioned new pieces. The spotlight falls on three types of works — monumental wall paintings, colorful Pixel Box installations and interactive Drawing Machines.

In the installation of the works, contradiction takes center-stage. Playing with the nature of drama — be this epic or mundane, short or big, or perhaps all of these at once — the project adapts exhibition space to draw out the tensions and attractions between the distinct impulses that animate Bulloch’s practice. For Witte de With, the artist interprets and manipulates earlier, potentially clashing installations into a seemingly harmonious whole, revealing a particular beauty which lies at the heart of complexity.

Bulloch’s approach is interdisciplinary, incorporating references from a wide array of sources, amongst them modern history, vanguard film, punk and electronic music. In her wall paintings, specific references to aesthetic, political or social developments are deconstructed and graphically re-assembled. Through this process of détournement, the artist questions the informational status of an artwork, as well as the possibility of narrating history. Bulloch’s Drawing Machines are interactive pieces, triggered or altered by the movements of visitors. In this way, her works explore the dialectic between technology and labor, making us conscious of our place, and that of others, within the gallery space. With her Pixel Boxes, Bulloch ‘programs’ our experience of art by encoding her signature modular light and sound installations with data from a vast array of cultural sources. Though these sources and the workings behind the installations remain invisible, a viewer may sense the imposition of a predefined code, even if unconsciously.

The manipulation of codes and a sense of control pervade Bulloch’s artistic practice. Whether that code is music- or text-based, the artist plays with and orchestrates our perception and experience of art. In proposing that this experience can be ’subliminal’ her work aims to stage that which is beyond our grasp.

Curated by Amira Gad & Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Canada) is a Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist. She is recognized as one of the Young British Artists and was included in the 1988 Freeze Exhibition. In 1997, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks…, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2011); Discrete Manifold Whatsoever, Simon Lee Gallery, London; Redux, Esther Schipper, Berlin (both 2010); and The space that time forgot, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus & Kunstbau, Munich (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Art Parcours, Art Basel 41, Münster Cathedral, Basel; A Roll Of The Dice, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon; Drawing Time, Galeries Poirels, Frac Lorraine, Metz; High ideals and crazy dreams, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg; and Open light in private spaces, Biennale for international Light Art, Unna (all 2010); Universal Code, The Power Plant, Toronto; and Yellow and Green, MMK Frankfurt, Frankfurt (both 2009). Bulloch teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION
Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch
ISBN: 978-94-91435-00-3

To accompany the exhibition, Witte de With Publishers will release Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch in March 2012. In addition to visual documentation of the exhibition, this publication will include critical texts by Nav Haq and John Miller as well as a script by Christine Lang and Christoph Dreher. It will also feature a special selection from Angela Bulloch’s Rules series under the title of “Rules of this Century.”

Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch is the 10th and final publication of Witte de With Publishers’ Source Book series, monographic publications providing an in-depth look into one artist’s practice.

Visit Witte de With’s online shop: www.wdw.nl/shop

Supported by: Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Den Haag, and The Canada Council for the Arts.