Facts and Rumours

Each year, since its inception in 1990, Witte de With invited an artist to curate an exhibition. Witte de With encourages each guest curator to develop his project according to his own personal choices so that the resulting exhibition offers the audience another vision, independent of the center’s own program.

The second artist invited to curate an exhibition at Witte de With was Henk Visch from the Netherlands (1950). Other guest curators have been Jiri Georg Dokoupil (in 1990), Haim Steinbach (in 1992), Daniel Buren (in 1994) and Jef Cornelis (in 1995).

Henk Visch selected works by the following colleagues: Diane Arbus (1923), Mike Bidlo (1953), Guillaume Bijl (1946), Meg Cranston (1960), Anke Doberauer (1962), Jan Fabre (1958), Benoit Hermans (1963), John Körmeling (1951), Bernd Lohaus (1940), Reinhard Niedermeier (1959), Manfred Stumpf (1957), Henk Visch (1950), Franz Erhard Walther (1939) and Robin Winters (1950).

With Facts and Rumours Visch asked himself how a collection of heterogeneous objects, like works in an exhibition, can relate to each other. According to Visch, neither exhibitions nor works of art have the specificity or certainty of a fact or statement. With his selection and combination of artworks, Visch sought to start a continuous process of associations, suggestions, and rumours.

His motivation went as follows: “Just beginning something – does one know the beginning of a beginning? – may lead to an unexpected outcome, even to an outcome one does not want (very likely), which makes it necessary to do something – something else – to get away from it. Apparently one thing leads to another. Great forces are involved. By doing one thing, the other, without realizing it, is initiated, set in motion, summoned.”