Morality is a multi-faceted project that was presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) in 2009 and 2010.
While there are certain moral principles that are usually unquestioned, morality remains ambivalent and amorphous in terms of the principles it provides for humans acting in the world. It is these amorphous areas, these gray zones, that this project sought to address, particularly in how they form a difficult aspect of our reality today.
The Morality project was conceived as an invitation to reflect and debate situations in contemporary life that refuse clear distinctions between right and wrong, what is and what ought to be. As a whole, this project has been defined by a desire – inherent to contemporary art – to open spaces for active, engaged forms of spectatorship that are not predetermined by either moral or ideological imperatives.
Rather than presenting statements that can be perceived as being right or wrong, good or evil, the project Morality aimed to 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.
The year-long Morality program at Witte de With was structured as a series of interrelated Acts that began in the Fall of 2009 and ran until November 2010, including six in-house exhibitions: Beautiful from Every Point of View; From Love to Legal; I Could Live in Africa; Power Alone; Remember Humanity; and Of Facts and Fables. It also included the satellite exhibition Nether Land at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai as part of the World Expo 2010. Also presented as part of the Morality project were: A film cycle tilted And the moral of the story is…; the performance program Let Us Compare Mythologies; the symposium Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality, that included master classes, and four interventions on Witte de With’s façade under the umbrella of “Between You and I”. Beyond the exhibitions, online visitors were invited to participate by contributing to a web-platform.
The Acts were structured and conceived as tentative hypotheses, casting an unusual light on important themes in contemporary political thought and realities. After years of contemplation, deliberation and retrospection, this book Morality in Fragments, is the final Act that summarizes and concludes the loaded Morality project.
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