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 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. The essential part of the original project was an installation built for that particular space, made of three intersecting Möbius strips ‘circling’ around the gallery, and functioning as a platform for the works of other artists. For the book, we created a model of this structure and used a pinhole camera to photograph it, which resulted in a series of photographs giving the structure a form and ‘life’ we previously did not anticipate. On the images, the structure is still visible, but their blurry and foggy atmosphere shows a different universe, closer to the world of dreams and imagination. The discrepancy between the world of ideas and the possibilities of their execution in the ‘real’, material world functioned in itself as another Möbius strip that brought us back to our starting question. As it seems, there is no need for censorship today due to a fact that particular artworks will never be produced in the first place.
The book includes 17 series of photographs, each of them offering a different imaginary walk through the structure, a walk accompanied by the fragments of texts by several individuals who inspire us while working on the project: Vladimir Odoevsky, Frederick Kiesler, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck‐Morss, Juhani Pallasmaa, Italo Calvino, and Steven Holl. The book is also accompanied by our own theoretical reflection on the artistic process and the experience we went through after the cancellation of the project.
Kiesler Stiftung Wien
Für ihre Präsentation in der Kiesler Stiftung Wien stellen PSWAR großformatige Fotografien eines Modells her, das Kieslers Idee vom „unaufhörlichen“ Raum in Form einer begehbaren Möbiusschleife darstellt. Auf hölzernen Latten montiert, strukturiert das fotografische Medium den Raum, indem es Passagen ausbildet, durch den der Betrachter geschleust wird.
Kiesler Stiftung Wien, Mariahilfer Straße 1B/1, 1060 Wien
Ausstellung: 18. November 2009 – 26. Februar 2010 Mo- Fr. 9-17h
Public Space With A Roof (www.pswar.org) is an artists’ initiative founded in Amsterdam in 2003 and is a collaboration of the artists Tamuna Chabashvili (Georgia, 1978), Adi Hollander (Belgium, 1976) and theoretician Vesna Madzoski (Serbia, 1976). From 2004 PSWAR has produced large-scale projects, blurring the borders between various roles today’s artists are assumed to take: artists-as-activists, artists-as-producers, or artist-as-curators. The essential part of each project is an installation which functions as a public space, a framework for the whole project and an open laboratory. In here, different artworks, theories and ideas are encountered and viewed from new perspectives, reflecting the questions posed at the beginning of the project and simultaneously rejecting the position of closed and final answers. PSWAR projects are research-based and address various questions central in current art production: the possibility for collaboration and collective action, development of new exhibition formats, creation of platforms for intimate and individual experience of artworks, the use of others’ artworks as ready-mades, and the possibilities for sensory activation of the spectators through changed parameters of the space.
Passages Through (the Unfinished Monument) A project initiated by: Public Space With A Roof - Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander, and Vesna Madzoski
Photographs by: Adi Hollander and Tamuna Chabashvili
Photo Lab: AAP Lab, Amsterdam
Editors: Public Space With A Roof
Text by: Vesna Madzoski
Text editor: Astrid Van Weyenberg
Designed and published by: Roma Publications, Amsterdam, Roger Willems
Printed and bound by: Drukkerij Wilco, Amersfoort
Edition: 1000
The publication is made possible by individual donations and the kind support by: The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and Mondrian Foundation; Materiaalfonds; AAP Lab, Amsterdam; Model & Objekt, Rotterdam
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Die Publikation Passages Through (The Unfinished Monument) basiert auf einem Ausstellungskonzept, das nie realisiert wurde. Wenige Wochen vor der Eröffnung wurde das Projekt vom Auftrag gebenden Museum abgesagt und damit Monate intensiver Arbeit zunichte gemacht. In der Folge wurde die Idee geboren, ein Buch zu entwerfen, das sich in der Form einer speziellen Weiterentwicklung auch mit dem Scheitern des Projekts auseinandersetzt. Die Künstlerinnen der Initiative PSWAR (Public Space With A Roof) fertigten mit einer Lochkamera vom Inneren des Ausstellungsmodells – einer Holzkonstruktion von drei ineinander greifende Möbiusschleifen - Fotografien an. Die so entstandene Bilddokumentation der geplanten Raumintervention eröffnete Perspektiven, die ein vollkommen neues Universum von eigenständiger Wesensart vor Augen führt. Die dem Virtuellen verpflichtete Präsentation der Fotografie führte die Künstlerinnen wieder zum Ausgangspunkt ihrer künstlerischen Recherche, wo die Idee eines Projekts noch der Welt der Phantasie und der reinen Vorstellung angehört. Die Publikation beinhaltet Texte von und zu Vladimir Odoevsky, Frederick Kiesler, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck‐Morss, Juhani Pallasmaa, Italo Calvino, and Steven Holl.
Kiesler Stiftung Wien
Für ihre Präsentation in der Kiesler Stiftung Wien stellen PSWAR großformatige Fotografien eines Modells her, das Kieslers Idee vom „unaufhörlichen“ Raum in Form einer begehbaren Möbiusschleife darstellt. Auf hölzernen Latten montiert, strukturiert das fotografische Medium den Raum, indem es Passagen ausbildet, durch den der Betrachter geschleust wird.