Decorations started with Kasper Bosmans’ close reading of 20+ Years Witte de With, an anthology published by the institution following its 20th anniversary, listing all exhibitions and other projects that took place at Witte de With between 1990 and 2011. During his research into the institution’s history, Bosmans made numerous annotations and footnotes, scribbles and sketches in the margins across the pages. Adding his own remarks and critical notes, the artist opens up this well-edited historiography to new interpretations.
This publication also features photographs taken from artist Asger Jorn’s 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art, a project part of his Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism, founded in 1961 as an interdisciplinary institute aimed at ‘vandalizing’ art history. Jorn understood vandalism not as a destructive gesture, but rather as the playful displacement and compilation of signs and motifs. By strategically inserting these historical images into the visual and textual narrative of the 20+ Years Witte de With book, unexpected dialogues between the two registers of information can take place. Historicizing descriptions are unhinged by personal notes and remarks, project texts are confronted with new visual companions.
Maneuvering both personal tastes and the myths surrounding Asger Jorn as well as those artists who have become part of Witte de With’s legacy, this book does not aim to complete the existing overview of the institution’s past activities, but rather to add another layer to the sediments of its history.
Decorations and the eponymous exhibition by Kasper Bosmans are part of the WDW25+ Commissions program, a series of artistic and curatorial approaches to source materials from institutional and personal archives. The commissions in the series variously deconstruct and engage with canonical moments in our own history and provide a platform for previously unacknowledged cultural histories and figures whose presentation will loop back into and supplement Witte de With’s archive.