ABOUT BETTINA WITTEVEEN

Bettina WitteVeen was born in Germany in 1958. She graduated with a BA in American Studies from Wellesley College, USA in 1980 and studied Law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.  Her career comprises three long-term projects - demanding decades long research, on-location photography and filming - which she has exhibited to international acclaim.

WitteVeen’s first project “Sacred Sister,” a meditation on spirituality, myth and womanhood, was part of the artist in residence program at the Watermill Center, Watermill, New York.  Her collaboration with Robert Wilson was exhibited at Art Basel/Miami Beach in 2003 and documented in a monograph published by Verve Editions in 2002. Twelve black and white portraits from her “Hybrid Identities” series were included in the highly popular exhibition “Body Art: Marks of Identity” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, 1999-2000.

“The Erlking” Trilogy, WitteVeen’s broad philosophical re-interpretation of Goethe’s poem was exhibited by the Miart Foundation at OmniArt Miami in 2005 and by White Space Gallery in Amsterdam in 2006.  Another variation of “The Erlking” was part of the Berliner Liste Contemporary Art Fair in 2010.

The film version of “The Erlking/Altar to Shiva” (Philip Reinhold Productions) debuted at Munich Modern, Germany 2011.  It was shown at Cutlog Artist’s Film Festival in Paris and was nominated for the New Writing Prize and the Discovery Prize in 2013.

WitteVeen’s interest in history, the philosophy of the law, and her commitment to pacifism and justice are the conceptual basis of her worldwide installation project with the summary title, “The Heart of Darkness.” “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” was sponsored by the French government for L’été Photographique de Lectoure, France in 2005.  WitteVeen exhibited “Brüder, Zur Sonne, Zur Freiheit and the beat goes on” as part of New York Museum Mile at the Goethe Institut, New York City, 2006.  She was the first artist to exhibit more than 100 photographs, “Der Tod und Das Mädchen/Death and the Maiden” in a former WWII air raid bunker at Königstadt-Brauerei Exhibition Space in Berlin, 2008. WitteVeen’s large-scale multimedia exhibition “When We Were Soldiers once and young” was installed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Brooklyn, NY in 2015; to date she is the only artist to have had access to the decommissioned and abandoned hospital building.  She transformed two floors of the site into an epic meditation on war and healing. The exhibition was picked up by the Associated Press and received international attention.

WitteVeen was invited by one of the most important national sites in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin and contributed to the nation’s commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the end of WWI in 2018 with an installation ambiguously titled, “II.II.I8 Dämmerung.”  The artist transformed the church’s chapel into a place of reflection and commemoration by placing a life size and cruciform photographic sculpture and a bed of live flowers and by an audio-visual sound installation to an emotionally powerful and visually arresting tableau.