‘The Show is Over
 (Öğüt & Macuga: Episode 2)’ by Ahmet Öğüt and Goshka Macuga at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Upon Witte de With’s invitation, Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt began a conversation, and identified parallel references drawn from their shared concerns, personal stories, and the ideas driving their respective practices. Early on in their exchange, Macuga proposed to take up the notions of destruction and “sudden change” to be played out upon the pair’s work using the exhibition space as test-site, as a means to explore processes of reconstruction. With The Show is Over, Macuga sets out to question how far destruction can work to critique, protest, and confront the present cultural predicament and builds on a rich heritage of artists that have engaged with the gesture of destruction both as subject, concept, and process over the years. In the face of the recent surge of culture wars as well as right-wing agendas that have come to dominate the political landscape, “what can be gained by enlisting destruction for social critique but also anarchic, pointless destruction; destruction for the pure pleasure of it?”—as posed by Russell Ferguson in his paper The Show is Over (2014), after which the exhibition is named. Further, how far may destruction be invoked to challenge the perceived stability of art and its institutions through transformative processes of shattering, hijacking, and undoing in order to engage in reinvention? In such an exercise, the pair’s work and working relationship is challenged, manifested as, and through, a gesture of drastic change. (Episode 1 was steered by Öğüt and took place May 17–August 20.)

Goshka Macuga, Drawing no. 4 ‘Path of Movement of a Point’ after K. Malevich (1922) (Smashed) (2003/2017). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Kristien Daem

Goshka Macuga, Star Smashers Occupation Room (2017). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Kristien Daem

Goshka Macuga, Arriving at the Black (2017), includes: Ahmet Öğüt, River Crossing Puzzle (2010) & Ahmet Öğüt, Anti-Debt Monolith (2014). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Kristien Daem

Goshka Macuga, Expanded Version of Where is Karl Marx? (2017), includes: Ahmet Öğüt, Where is Karl Marx? (2016) & Ahmet Öğüt, The Castle of Vooruit (2012). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Kristien Daem

Goshka Macuga, Arriving at the Black (2017), includes: Ahmet Öğüt, River Crossing Puzzle (2010) & Ahmet Öğüt, Anti-Debt Monolith (2014). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Kristien Daem

Subodh Patil (Assistant professor Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen) Disorder, dislocation, and the arrow of time (2017). Öğüt – Macuga: Episode 2: The Show is Over, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2017. Photo: Nieuwe Beelden Makers