This website publishes the program of Kunstinstituut Melly from January 2021 onwards, when the institution's renaming came into effect. The website fkawdw.nl has been kept intact and serves as an illustrated archive of our institution’s activities from 1990 to 2020 under the name Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. The website change.wdw.nl documents our institution’s multi-year name change initiative (2018-2022).

Mission

Kunstinstituut Melly was originally conceived as an art-house with a mission to present and discuss the ideas and work created today by visual artists and cultural makers. To fulfill the core mission of presenting contemporary art and theory, we organize exhibitions, commission art, publish and develop educational and collaborative initiatives. In doing so, we apply a practice of collective learning. This means we spatialize and socialize different forms of knowledge. Public engagement is intrinsic to our creative processes and artistic outcomes.

We believe that experiencing art and theory this way is vital to enjoy our present and learn with and about culture. We have especially worked with artists and engaged audiences who pose challenging inquiries and articulations of our present. We are interested in catalyzing thought and have been known for inspiring public debates. And while Kunstinstituut Melly’s program considers the contemporary, it also regards how art has been created and experienced in the past, and it imagines the many futures art can come to shape. Here, art is a motion; learning is porous.

Name

Since our foundation in 1990 and for three decades, our institution was named Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and commonly called "Witte de With." In 2021, we officially changed our institution's name to Kunstinstituut Melly.

Our former name is eponymous to our institution’s location: Witte de Withstraat. This choice in naming promoted Rotterdam's cultural policy of the 1980s to transform the street into a “museum boulevard”. The street’s namesake is Witte Corneliszoon de With, a seventeenth-century naval officer, serving in the Dutch East India Company and Dutch West India Company. These companies were instrumental in the Netherlands’ colonial expansion. While our institution’s name referred by association to the naval officer’s proper name, our building is not his home, nor does it house his collection or focus on his legacy.

Our new name takes inspiration from the transformative outcomes of our institution’s ground-floor gallery space, which in 2018 was repurposed from a white-cube gallery into a hybrid art and events space with a dynamic program, welcoming new audiences. This space was renamed from Untitled to MELLY in 2019 by a diverse group of emerging professionals in Rotterdam, through a community-led collective learning process. This spatial and programmatic transformation was an initial response to “An Open Letter to Witte de With,” published in 2017 during the development of “Cinema Olanda: Platform” by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Lucy Cotter at our institution.

The name ‘Melly’ originally refers to the billboard-artwork "Melly Shum Hates Her Job" by Ken Lum, installed on our building’s façade since 1990. This work portrays a smiling young woman of Asian descent in an office, along with the title’s message typed and scaled at equal proportion. The protagonist, Melly Shum, has come to signify not only the image of a female, working-class anti-hero. It has also come to stand for resilience and immigration as widespread social experiences. For our institution, these ideas have mobilized a more acute intersectional approach to culture and compelled us to foster more inclusive public engagements.

Our name change acknowledges the urgency to question cultural narratives that may symbolically uphold and unconsciously reproduce social discrimination. In this sense, we see the institution’s renaming as part of larger conversations on decolonizing, representation, and dissonant heritage in the Netherlands and abroad. The fact that our building was a former school has been inspirational for us throughout our name change initiative, reminding us of the role those cultural institutions must play as learning environments.

For these reasons, the greater goal spearheaded through our name change initiative is to be more accepting, understanding, and actively inclusive of a multi-vocal society. Besides our renaming, the initiative has involved over the last three years a number of staff hires and board recruitments, the establishment of new forms of public engagement, as well as team training sessions and policy development. You can read more details and information about our renaming here.

History

Founded in 1990 with the name Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, our institution is now named, since 2021, Kunstinstituut Melly. Whether with one name or other, throughout our lifetime we have intrepidly commented on cultural predicaments through the presentation of exhibitions, symposia, education programs, live events, and publications. Since the start, we have both engaged with and provoked developments in contemporary art locally and across the world. We are responsive, innovative, and experimental. Collaboration is at the heart of our activities. Working both with a curatorial team and guest researchers from around the world, Kunstinstituut Melly offers a dynamic program.

Under a changing directorship every three to six years, our institution’s artistic vision and its programming team renews itself continuously. Each director of the institution has contributed to forging new definitions of exhibition-making. Each has been given the opportunity to make their personal mark on the program, too. In succession, the directors include: Chris Dercon from 1990 to 1995; Bartomeu Marí from 1996 to 2001; Catherine David from 2002 to 2004; Hans Maarten van den Brink, interim director from May 2004 to April 2006; Nicolaus Schafhausen from 2006 to 2011; Defne Ayas from 2012 to 2017; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy from 2018 to 2023; and since 2024 Gabi Ngcobo.

Our institution has a rich tradition of commissioning new works, installations, and performances. Here, artists have pushed their boundaries by working on different scales and by exploring new media. We have introduced numerous non-European artists to the Dutch and European art scenes, and we are renowned for hosting internationally acclaimed artists for their first solo exhibitions or retrospectives, including Ken Lum (1990), Hélio Oiticica (1992), Frederick Kiesler (1997), David Lamelas (1997), Meschac Gaba (2001), Yto Barrada (2004), Saâdane Afif (2008), Cosima von Bonin (2011), Qiu Zhijie (2012), AA Bronson (2013), and Cecilia Vicuña (2019).

In the last couple of years, we have been committed to the practice and promotion of collective learning. The purpose of this is to challenge assumptions about contemporary art and culture, and to encourage new interpretations of artistic questions and their social context. With this in mind, we have hosted field-leading thinkers, and influential makers and interpreters of contemporary art and culture, however unknown they are at this time. We have also advanced the art canon and influenced makers and thinkers through our widely distributed and format-defining publications.

Kunstinstituut Melly’s four-floor building is located on Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam's Cool District. Our building was originally built in the 1870s as a girls' school. When we moved into this building to start our activities in 1990, we organized and presented exhibitions on the top two vacant floors of the building. All the while, the first floors of the building were occupied by a school. The school eventually relocated, however, at Kunstinstituut Melly we continue regarding our venue as a site of learning. Our gallery spaces occupy two floors upstairs. On the ground floor is our multi-use gallery, which we use for displays and events, a cantina and a bookshop. We simply call it MELLY.

Kunstinstituut Melly shared part of its ground-floor with TENT, the exhibition space of CBK Rotterdam. As of May 2024, Hiphophuis lives under the same roof, marking a new era of cultural activity in the heart of Rotterdam. Their program in our shared building will begin in September 2024.

This website publishes the program of Kunstinstituut Melly from January 2021 onwards, when the institution's renaming came into effect. The website fkawdw.nl has been kept intact, and serves as an illustrated archive of the institution’s activities during its first three decades, from 1990 to 2020. For its part, the website change.wdw.nl has progressively recorded the institution’s name change initiative, formally begun in 2018. In 2020, during the first lockdown to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, we created a digital strategy and online platform, still available to date: offsite.wdw.nl.

We invite you to sign-up to our newsletter and to follow our activities via Instagram, Facebook, and X. If you would like to receive by postal mail our beautifully designed printed invitations, please subscribe to our membership program.

Archive

Kunstinstituut Melly’s Archive focuses on our institution’s exhibition history and activities from 1990 to the present. A number of images, documents, ephemera, and audio and visual materials in the Archive are digitized or are in this process. While documenting and filing has been a consistent practice as part of our project planning, the archive was systemically configured in 2016. Our archive has been a valuable resource for many arts professionals, researchers, educators and students interested in learning from the contents and processes behind our extensive events and exhibition programs.

If you are interested in making an appointment to access our Archive, please contact us. We would be happy to welcome you.

If you are simply curious to learn about our recent program history, you are on the right website. You can also find here a number of publications we have released over the years: some of these are available to download as PDFs for free; some of these are available for sale; some of them are out of print but can be accessed in our Archive. For its part, on the website fkawdw.nl, you can find information about our activities from 1990 to 2020, when our institution was named Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.

These in-house projects focus on our institutional and exhibition history:

- The publication “20+ Years. Witte de With” (2012) documenting the first two decades of the institution’s activities.

- The artist-curated exhibition “WERE IT AS IF. Beyond An Institution That Is” (2016) by Bik van der Pol, including its accompanying publication, developed as part of the institution’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

- The publication Tools for Collective Learning focusing on the name change initiative of the institution, including its renaming from Witte de With to Kunstinstituut Melly. Download the introduction here.

We also encourage you to check out these projects which have dynamically focused on activating our Archive: on a 1990 project by Jef Geys, displayed in 2018; on a 1992 public art project by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, displayed in 2018; about the 2002-2003 long-term project Contemporary Arab Image Representations by Catherine David, displayed in 2019; about Ken Lum’s Melly Shum Hates Her Job, presented in 2019 – 2020; about Constant's New Babylon, displayed in 2021 - 2022.

Many students and researchers have written articles or dissertations about our institution and past or current programs and activities. If you are one of them and would like to inform us and make available to us the bibliographical reference of your article or dissertation, whether as a printed copy for our Archive or as a PDF for our Archive and/or to make it publicly available on this website, please contact us.

Annual Reports

Download our annual 2023 report here, click here for 2022, 2021 and for 2020.

Older annual reports, 2019 and before, are archived here.

Our annual reports are only available in Dutch.

Team & Supervisory Board

Supporters

Kunstinstituut Melly is supported by the City of Rotterdam and the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science in The Netherlands. Additional support is provided by Ammodo, Droom en Daad, and the Hartwig Foundation.

The 2024 program is also supported by the following foundations and partners: Amarte Fonds, Creative Australia, Fonds 21, Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie, Mondriaan Fonds, SAHA Association, Tsjechisch centrum Rotterdam, Teiger Foundation, VriendenLoterij Fonds.

Our activities are also supported through grants from private foundations, individual donations, and income from admission tickets, sale of limited editions, and events. We invite you to make a contribution.

Opportunities

Kunstinstituut Melly has served as a springboard to many contemporary artists, who found with us early or unprecedented exposure to their work. The institution has also been a springboard to many arts professionals. It is here where many emerging curators, writers, and educators got their first institutional experience, and where a meaningful opportunity to develop their work or ideas was found. Kunstinstituut Melly adheres to the Governance Code Cultuur, the Fair Practice Code, and the Code Cultural Diversity and Inclusion.

Vacancies

Kunstinstituut Melly is Looking for two members of its Supervisory Board.

Internships

We regularly offer paid internships to emerging art professionals and students enrolled in secondary or higher education schools. These internships are an opportunity to acquire work experience at a contemporary art institution. Internships are for a period of four to six months; and, for a period of one to three months for international applicants outside of the EU. To be considered for an internship, please send your C.V. along with a one-page Cover Letter to applications [​at​] kunstinstituutmelly.nl, with the subject heading “Internship”.