In August 1972, a Turkish landlord evicted a Dutch woman living in the Afrikaanderwijk neighborhood of Rotterdam. This event became the trigger for riots which saw people from all over the country pour into the Afrikaanderwijk to watch as anti-immigration protesters destroyed homes in the majority-immigrant neighborhood. Ten years ago, the Turkish artist Cihad Caner moved to Afrikaanderwijk. Having happened upon the story of this riot, he attempted to reconstruct a collective understanding of its history with his 2023 film (Re)membering the riots in Afrikaanderwijk in 1972 or guest, host, ghos-ti. The exhibition is sparse. A white room is scattered with archival images scratched into red MDF plates. Inscribed into some of the plates are scenes showing people rioting on the streets of Afrikaanderwijk; others show the inside of immigrant homes that are visibly looted and in disarray. With this simple gesture, Caner places the Dutch rioters as the outsiders on the streets and the immigrant workers as the insiders in their homes—probing the latter’s status as outsiders in the Dutch collective psyche. The viewer, meanwhile, is made to oscillate between being on the inside and the outside as they navigate the installation. Caner is an artist of Turkish descent, …

Watching Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s silent 16mm film Otros usos [Other uses] (2014) is like looking into a kaleidoscope made with old snapshots too nondescript to make it into an album but nonetheless strangely fascinating. A composite image of four shots of a tranquil sea, each aligned to the edges of the frame, spins in a circle. As they oscillate, the distant shoreline in each shot tilts and merges with the next. The anachronistic sound of the projector, installed on a pedestal in the gallery, combines with the faint heat produced by the machine to heighten the body’s senses, like the effect of ASMR. I feel that Muñoz wants me, the viewer, to feel disoriented, employing a combination of the images’ banality and their movement to lull me into a dream state. They want to suspend my desire for narrative resolution and a fixed horizon. Both Otros usos and another silent 16mm film projected beside it, Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016) do have a precise physical referent: the island of Vieques in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico that the US Navy used as a bombing range and a training ground for over sixty years. In Otros usos, Muñoz’s carefully folded image is …

In January 2018, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy took over as director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, replacing Defne Ayas who, like me, started working in the Dutch “second city” in 2012. Witte de With’s directors are initially hired for three years and their contract can be renewed once for a finite six years. This sets a tempo and creates momentum for the institution and its publics, which anticipate structural transitions and shifts in direction and content that impact the institution’s identity and legacy. You might have noticed that Witte de With has been the focus of attention lately. The contemporary art center celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016, during Ayas’s tenure, and she developed a number of exhibitions, publications, and public programs around institutional histories and heritage. These include the fascinating “Rotterdam Cultural Histories” displays Witte de With still co-produces with the art center TENT, which is housed in the same building on Witte de Withstraat, and whose local mission is to support artists based in the city. In addition, Ayas invited Rotterdam-based artist-duo Bik van der Pol—Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol—to work closely with Witte de With’s staff on the 2016 exhibition “WERE IT AS …