WATT presented work by 29 young artists at two locations, in Witte de With and the Kunsthal Rotterdam. Similar to Witte de With’s Voorwerk series, this group exhibition presented and juxtaposed works by relativily young, unknown artists, without the intention of defining positions.
The participating artists were: David Bade (1969), Vered Ben-Kiki (1960), Pierre Bismuth (1963), Christine Borland (1965), Rita McBride (1960), Dinos Chapman (1962), Jake Chapman (1966), Tacita Dean (1965), Olga Chernysheva (1962), Arturo Duclos (1959), Nicole Eisenman (1963), Chohrez Feyzdjou (1955-96), Peter Fillingham (1964), Claudia Di Gallo (1959) (visit her site at www.digallo.net), Yannick Gonzalez (1965), Douglas Gordon (1966), Erik van Lieshout (1968), Guy Limone (1958), Sarah Lucas (1962), Gabriel Orozco (1962), Hervé Paraponaris (1966), Wouter van Riessen (1967), Maria Roosen (1957), Yvan Salomone (1957), Yvonne Trapp (1964), Joëlle Tuerlinckx (1958), Marijke van Warmerdam (1959), Pae White (1963), and Maja Zomer (1961).
Samuel Beckett’s novel WATT inspired the title of this exhibition: “And sometimes Watt understood all, and sometimes he understood much, and sometimes he understood little, and sometimes he understood nothing, as now…” With the exhibition WATT, Witte de With responded to the current interest for group shows. The importance of group shows may lie in the creation of a new context for individual works of art, in which new meanings can be generated. In the confrontation with other works and environments, the work of art is forced to redefine itself over and over again. The decision to show works by the same artists at two different locations, and give the artworks more than one chance to react with one another and the architecture of the exhibitions space, made WATT an experimental group show. In this way, WATT showed the heterogeneity of contemporary art, permitting the works of the artists to intertwine, without any prearranged agreements or real common denominators.
Some of the artists included in WATT, were also presented in other exhibitions organized by Witte de With: Maria Roosen and Marijke van Warmerdam in the XLVI Biennale di Venezia (in 1995), Joëlle Tuerlinckx in the solo exhibition Pas d’histoire, Pas d’histoire (in 1994).
