Installation view © PSWAR
The Inverted City: Looking Through the Cracks of a Labyrinth
Centre Pompidou - Metz, 2011
Accepting the invitation to realize our new work in the framework of a large-scale exhibition devoted to the concept of labyrinth, among works of our idols and inspirations, we accepted the challenge to redefine our own practice of spatial intervention in a new context.
Our work reflected on three main levels: the concept of labyrinth, the space of a museum, and the works of presented artists.
Designed and published by: Roma Publications, Amsterdam, Roger Willems
The book: Passages Through (The Unfinished Monument)
Amsterdam, 2010
The book Passages Through (The Unfinished Monument) is a story about a project that never happened. Commissioned by KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland, the project was canceled two weeks before its realization. The sudden news came as a surprise, nullifying months of work and raising the questions regarding the disempowered position of the artists today. As a way of confrontation with the traumatic experience, the idea of creating a book was conceived.
© PSWAR
Passages Through
(The Unfinished Monument)
Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, 2009
The exhibited photographs present a selection from the series of images created for a publication about the project that was never realized and the structure that was never built. Within the two-dimensional parameters of the publication, the resulting photographs have given the structure a new ‘life’ and a form we have not anticipated before.
© PSWAR
Endless Installation - A Ghost Story For Adults
Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2009
Endless Installation: A Ghost Story For Adults started out with a research into questions of architecture and the narrative of exhibition making, as well as definitions of authorship. It presents a spatial confrontation between the work of three figures who have become particularly inspirational for this research: Frederick Kiesler, Aby Warburg, and Meir Agassi.
Designed and published by: Roma Publications, Amsterdam
Beauty Unrealized - spider webs of personal universes seeking a form
Public Space With a Roof, Amsterdam, 2007
In order to research the present status of beauty – understanding beauty not in terms of an object's internal quality but in terms of its effect on the beholder – PSWAR invited 94 persons of different professions and different backgrounds to submit lists of items or things that have inspired them professionally and privately. The result was a very personal library, a strange monument in which different intimate worlds came together.
© PSWAR
Pixels of Reality - What Do You Know, What Do You See?
Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam, 2006
Pixels of Reality was the starting phase of a project with which we wanted to open-up the discussion about the position of artists’ interventions in stimulating future social and political change. We wanted to re-examine the concepts ‘politics’ and ‘art’ in the overly used term ‘political art’, as well as the role of media in turning the aesthetics of our senses into anaesthetics.
OTHER PROJECTS:
Sketch of the Private Area
Stranger Exhibition: 77 Videos Under Pressure
ECF, Amsterdam, 2008
Youth is the time when human minds and bodies ‘explode’ in many ways. From almost 1000 videos made by young people worldwide, we selected 77 as the best representations of their dreams, fears, and questions posed to us all. This traveling exhibition starts its journey in the Gashouder building of the former Westergas Fabriek in Amsterdam. This space, once under high pressure, blends with selected videos that show delicate intimate worlds of youngsters, ‘exploding’ with creativity, unique aesthetics, poetics, colors, visions, and sounds.
International Amsterdam Film Festival
De Balie, Melkweg, 2008
This year, IAFF goes green. The environmental problems have been around for a long time - they are not new. We are all aware that the sustainability of the present system is an absolute impossibility.
The question is no longer "IF" but "WHEN" and "HOW". In this year’s edition, we will explore how wired art practices, environments, and interventions contribute to the discourse on sustainability.
Hiscox Art Award
Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, 2006
The Hiscox Art Award is an exhibition that aims to promote the innovative practices of five outstanding and inspiring young artists who are contributing to a central dialogue in the Dutch art world regarding the position of the artist within the art system. Having previously collaborated as a curatorial team on the exhibition project Volume, we were invited to scout artists from major art institutions and academies in the Netherlands. During the selection process, the total practice of an artist and the processes through which he or she develops a work became the determining factors.
