Bernadette Corporation

From 19 November, 2005, to 8 January, 2006, Witte de With will present Bernadette Corporation’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.

Opening November 18, 2005, 5.30 p.m.

Since 1994 the anonymous international group of artists that use the Bernadette Corporation logo have worked in various combinations at the boundaries of fashion, art and activism. The mainspring of their varied artistic output appears to be avoidance of a specific identity. Bernadette Corporation has successively stood for an underground fashion label (1995-1997), a privately published art magazine called Made in USA (1999-2001), a collective novel called Reena Spaulings (Semiotext(e), 2005) and various videos and installations. Although the media used are extremely varied, what these products have in common is their playful, intelligent rendering of the concept and their deliberately limited duration.

Witte de With has invited Bernadette Corporation to make a presentation documenting the last ten years of their work. The first materials of their new film production Pedestrian Cinema will also be shown for the very first time.

Pedestrian Cinema is a Berlin-based independent film production company which explores the margins of the film medium. The company will be working for a year on a digital film in which the mise-en-scène operates within an open-ended scenario. The first materials will be displayed on four different screens in Witte de With.

See for further information the website www.bernadettecorporation.com.

To accompany this exhibition, a magazine will be published on the Witte de With website as an impulse for more wide-ranging research into artistic practices in the 1990s. It includes contributions from Shumon Basar (Sexy Machinery, London), Claire Bishop (Royal College, London), Payam Shafiry (artist/writer, London/Paris), Daniël van der Velden (designer/writer, Amsterdam) and others.