Curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicholas Schaffhausen

It seems a given among contemporary practitioners that all art is political and therefore implicitly holds an ethical position. No doubt that idea will be healthily interrogated in Witte de With’s ambitious nine-month project comprising five exhibitions, film and performance programs, a three-day symposium, a website, a culminating publication, and an intriguingly broad list of artists, ranging from Sarah Morris to Nedko Solakov to participants in the Polish punk scene of the 1980s. What needs to be taken into account is an anthropology of morals that instantiates moralities, not morality, and countermands any universalist ideal of Kant’s founding question of ethical action, “What ought I to do?” The answers offered by this hugely ambitious project will surely be kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic, and highly contestable.

— Steven Henry Madoff