Public Space With A Roof (PSWAR) is Tamuna Chabashvili (1978, Tbilisi, Russia) Adi Hollander (1976, Brussels, Belgium) and Vesna Madzoski (1976, Zajecar, Yugoslavia) They live and work in Amsterdam. “Public Space With A Roof was founded in 2003 as an artists’ initiative
and a research project space with the aim of enabling young artists to develop and present their ideas, realise collaborative projects and engage in critical discourse… In December 2007 PSWAR closed the project space as we felt the need to further challenge our artistic language and practice, and create new dialogues with other spaces and other audiences.” They became Public Space Without A Roof, continuing with a new series of projects which combine an exhibition with accompanying series of performances, concerts, film screenings, lectures, public debate, and a reader.

www.pswar.org

About the project:
‘Endless Installation: A Ghost Story For Adults’ aims to share the discoveries made during an intensive research regarding questions of architecture and the narrative of exhibition making, as well
as definitions related to authorship. The best suitable form for this we found to be the exhibition structure; the exhibition appropriated by the artists as their main medium. Our position is to reject the artificial distance from the art works we are presenting: thereby negating the guiding principle in contemporary exhibition making. Instead, the exhibition became a form in itself to express personal impressions and the intimate fascination with the artists and works we present. This process and the act of our collaboration
challenged our own notions of individual authorship, subjectivity and identity. Our hope is that the installation recreates this experience and offers the viewer time and space for reflection and further inspiration.

…we decided to create a spatial confrontation between the work of three individuals who have made the strongest impact on us and who became our primary sources of inspiration: Frederick Kiesler, Aby Warburg and Meir Agassi. As these persons lived through three different periods of time and were from distinct geographic locations, and had never met ‘in real life’, our project became a fictional meeting point for their individual ‘universes’.
This fictional montage allowed us to define junctures of their ideas as well as offering new readings on their individual practices. In essence, we envision this exhibition as a theater piece where the actors are not living beings but are manifest in texts and images.”

CFPR loaned its collection of artists’ books by Meir Agassi to PSWAR for the project, for research and interpretation, this is an excerpt from the SMART Papers Endless Installation: A Ghost Story For Adults:

Our third ‘character’ is the Israeli-born writer, critic, and artist Meir Agassi (1947-98) who spent the last years
of his life in Bristol, UK, leaving behind
a complex body of work that has only recently been discovered and appreciated. The specific language he developed in his last years came from
his own ‘schizophrenia’ and the impossibility of expressing himself in a united body of work as one artist. To solve this, he created The Meir Agassi
Museum® which hosted the work of various fictional artists, each representing different aspects of questions he was interested in, as well as the
various ghosts inhabiting his mind. This way, he urges us to re-examine the common definitions of the author and authorship. In his questions, we
found the best expression for the questions we wanted to touch upon in this project: “How to bring together fragments of different idioms? How to be
able to work differently and with different conditions under one roof? How to bridge the impossible gap between the incomprehensible, strange,
incoherent, muddled, disjointed, disoriented, obscure, diverse, incomplete, lost fragments of the past and the incomprehensible, strange, incoherent,
muddled, disjointed, disoriented, obscure, diverse, incomplete, lost fragments of the present?”
(Agassi, Meir. Some Notes Toward The Meir Agassi Museum®, Special edition of 50 copies, November 1995, p.9).

Lectures included:
March 22, 1:30 pm – Yaniv Shapira: Who Are You Meir Agassi?
April 12, 2pm – Naomi Aviv: Meir Agassi: An Insider in the World of Outsiders

Naomi Aviv is the editor of the book The Jar from Tennessee – 50 articles on international art and artists written by the late author, poet and artist Meir Agassi.

For more information on PSWAR, and Endless Installation: A Ghost Story For Adults, see the website www.pswar.org where you can also download the Smart Paper with texts on this project.