Workshop

A core contribution chapter in Rotterdam Dialogues.

On three occasions, between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009, Witte de With, center for contemporary art, organized three symposia under the title 'Rotterdam Dialogues: The Critics, The Curators, The Artists'. Each three-day event focused on one agent in the art world, looking at their expectations, positions and the contexts in which they operate.

If a book cannot capture the atmosphere of lively excitement of 35 international critics, 48 curators and 57 artists, not to mention the 500+ visitors who attended each symposium, it can highlight the individual tone and spirit of many discussions that remain, by necessity, unfinished. This book follows a chronological structure, containing selected transcriptions from each symposium and the outcomes of the associated workshops. After this comes a free-wheeling section titled 'What are you talking about now?', a question sent to all the guests in the months that followed the symposia. Their diverse reactions give a sense of the range of characters, ideas and practices that the symposia brought together.

This book documents three large-scale symposia at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Structured to establish a lively platform for debate and exchange, these symposia explore the practice of three of the protagonists of the contemporary art world: the critic, the curator and the artist. Are they still the people who decide what art is made, what is seen, and whether it is ''good''? The book includes transcripts from workshops and dialogues, and also contains spirited contributions that arrived from participants in the months after the dialogues took place. Bringing together the cross-generational experience of the attendees, this compendium offers insights from some of the most renowned and promising figures in their fields.

Biography

Melissa Gronlund is an editor of Afterall and a writer based in London. Focusing on artists' film and specifically on female filmmaking of the past 15 years, she teaches on the MRes: Moving Image course at Central Saint Martins and on artists' film at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, where she is a visiting lecturer. She is also interested in the overlap between text and image in contemporary art.

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