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Curating

Public Space With A Roof

Overtoom 301, Amsterdam

2003–4

  • film academy_Overtoom_301,_entrance 2006 FINAL.jpg

Co-director of Public Space With A Roof (PSWAR) gallery and project space for contemporary art, Amsterdam (2003-2004), together with Adi Hollander and Tamuna Chabashvili. Located in the former film academy at that time, Public Space with A Roof created space for artistic and curatorial experimentation, cross-disciplinary discussion, artistic research, collective action, and collaboration. Founded in 2003, the gallery became a roaming institution in 2007.

Selected Program 2003-4

REALITY SOUNDTRACK

Artist: Tao F. Vrhovec-Sambolec (Slovenia)
Mixed media installation and moving sound intervention in public space.
Sound, FM radio transmitter, portable FM radio receivers.
26 February – 1 March 2004

Reality Soundtrack is a sound intervention for public spaces, such as post offices, passages, shopping malls, and streets. Equipping 25 or more participants, each with a single radio receiver, they walk together through parts of a city, following a given route outlined on an Intervention Map. All the radio receivers transmit the same electronic composition transmitted from a radio station with durations varying from an hour to two hours. The audible result of the action is a moving cloud of sound traveling through a city.
The goal of the intervention is to transpose a real situation in public space onto a plane of fiction. By intervening onto the perception of a random listener, the work disrupts an individual’s usual conditions of being in the city. The result of such alienation is that the listener no longer perceives reality as having immediate effect on his or her own existence but, rather, is introduced to it as an aesthetic phenomenon – a space of fiction.
By realizing Reality Soundtrack in different cities all over the world, the modalities, differences and similarities of architectural, social and psychogeographic spaces are exposed. The general mood of a city can be felt through the act of walking the abstract cloud of sound through the city. The way the buildings and streets reflect the sound, the way the people on the street or in a mall react towards this public intervention, from the first uncontrolled spontaneous reaction, to the way authorities deal with the sudden disruption, reflects the way in which the curiosity articulates itself in different situations. All these processes give a feeling of a place - an insight into the hidden and unconscious emotion of a city.

EEEHH… ARTISTS REACTING TO THE WORLD

Group Exhibition 
Participating artists: Keren Cytter (Israel); Mark Macdowell (USA); Wafae Ahalouch (Netherlands); Chiarae Mascapone (Italy); Sjoerd Tim (Netherlands); Binder Duendat (Germany)
4 – 24 December 2004

In the beginning man created painting and money. Painting was formless figurative etching, and man, who really liked this style said, How much does this thing cost? And the painting was sold. Man saw that the buying was good, and he separated the buying from the painting. Man called the painting art and the buying he called a deal. So man created the artist in his own image. The artist said: Let me produce art, paintings and sculpture in the gallery that attract a proper amount of money and some respect. And it was so. The man produced art - paintings valued according to their worth, and artists gaining respect and heroic status.
Days and months and years passed. And man created the museum. Now the artist formed within the space the photos of the galleries and the videos of the public spaces. He showed them to the art critic to see what he would name them, and the art critic named each style and form. And that was its name. And the artist said to the art critic, "Why should I separate the paint and the sculpture, the photograph, the video and the performance?" And the art critic called the curator. And the curator said, "It's a great idea, we should mix everything together and art can be more interesting." And the art crittic said, "Yes it could even be interactive." And the innocent veiwer went to the exhibition and said "Eeehh..." And it was so.
Then the artist said, "Let me produce everything I can - video as sculpture, sculpture as painting, painting as documentation, documentation as photography, photography as print, print as text, text as an idea." And the art dealer saw that the installation was good and the installation sold. Now the earth was corrupt in man's sight and was full of violence. And the curator saw how corrupt the earth had become for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So the curator said to the art critic "I see all of this, and I think maybe we should react to all these political waves as globalisation and anti-globalisation and generally be a bit more involved in world politics". And the art critic called the artist. And the artist said, "It's a great idea, why should I separate the political, the curator, the gallerist, the gallery space, the style and the content?" And the art critic said, "Yes it could even be interactive". And the innocent viewer went to the exhibition and said "Eeehh...". And the art dealer saw that the installation was good and the installation was sold.
Then the anger of the poor burned against this art world and he turned me, Keren Cytter against them saying, "Let me curate an exhibition - Dutch and German sculpture on a level that allows free interpretation, Dutch Moroccan artist with an Israeli settler in a 50-minute documentary, an American conceptual artist and an authentic Italian wall painter." And people saw that the idea was good and the idea was sold.

PLUG-IN: VIDEO ART

Group exhibition
Participating artists: Taro Pieterson, David Dijindikhashvili, Jesus de Las Heras, Luciano Valerio, among others.
25 March 2004

An on-the-spot video art exhibition, open to the public for one evening only. Artists are invited to bring their video art and video recorder to the gallery and create the exhibition together in a spirit of collaboration. The exhibition is intended to be a time-based interactive event, offering artists the chance to exhibit without the limitation and defining nature of a selection process. 

RIDDLES AND LANGUAGE GAMES
Solo exhibition Tine Melzer (Switzerland)
Mixed media installation 
4 – 7 March 2004

She displaced some objects in the room. Every object you see for the second time becomes part of what you consider your possession. The order of those objects define the level of ease and pleasure.The functions and names of these objects seem meaningful - objects which are owned by people always complement their image, the order and quality they appear in reflects the person's soul. Things and people mirror each other. She looked around and liked all she saw. Most of the things occupied as little space possible.

IN BETWEEN

Solo exhibition Pantellis Makkas (Greece)
Mixed media installation
4 – 7 March 2004

TO BE BODY. FULL BODY. NOT AS MUCH AS WE WANT. NOT AS MUCH AS WE CAN. NOT AS MUCH AS WE NEED. ALL THE BODY. FROM ALWAYS. FROM EVERYWHERE. THIS IS THE BODY. THIS IS THE BODY THAT I AM. I DON'T HAVE ANY MORE NEEDS. WHY HAVE ANY MORE? THERE IS NO MORE.

A4 FOR 5

An experimental time-based interactive exhibition with impromptu participating artists 
23 January 2004

An on-the-spot A4 exhibition, open to the public for one evening only. Artists are invited to bring their art works: photos, sketches, photo copies, drawings and any other A4-sized documents to the gallery to create the exhibition together in a spirit of collaboration. The exhibition is intended to be a time-based interactive event, offering artists the chance to exhibit, sell and exchange their work without the limitation and defining nature of a selection process. All A4’s will be priced at five euros, with one euro for PSWAR and four for the artist.

BETWEEN TWO SIDES

Solo exhibition Chen (Tim) Chuanxi (China)
5 – 8 February 2004

it rains.
it snows.
it is grey.
it is dark.
the light in the window is on.
I am leaving. 

NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

Group exhibition
Alexandra Bachzetsis, Wolf von Kries, Anne de Vries
14 – 15 February 2004

Nothing in Particular is an installation-based version of a performance project in-progress by Wolf von Kries and Alexandra Bachzetsis. This installation performance deals with phenomena fromeveryday life which seem to escape rational reasoning by appearing out of the blue or by disappearing without any feasible cause. The subject matter originates in the model of 'Creatio ex nihilo', a term which signifies the creation of the world out of nothing. While this is a subject of heated debate in religious and scientific realms, the performance seeks to interrogate the subject in the context of daily routines and occurrences. 
For the project, this model serves merely as a point of departure from a reinterpretation of banal situations in order to translate them into an aesthetic strategy. In the context of everyday constellations, it manifests itself as an event which springs to mind without a trace of its whereabouts; actions which seem to be dematerialised without a preceding (or following) chain of causality, and which by their very nature tend to be characterised as accidents or coincidences. They are part of the outside world, aswell as being present in internal realms such as the processing or generating of information by the (sub)conscious. However wide the spectrum of seemingly unrelated incidents may be, they share the common trait that their indeterminability gives way to an infinite number of interpretations, which seem equally (im)probable. By juxtaposing models of causality in which actual occurrences and coincidences develop, in which the action or object is stripped of its preconceived historicity, thus allowing its isolated perception as well as its free positioning in a multitude of possible pasts. This creates a pattern of references that seems to indicate a structure beyond analytic reasoning.

LOOP: A VIRTUAL REALITY

Solo exhibition Klaas Koetje
11 April 2004

Fuck it. It's a beamer. It's a contemporary magic lantern. And the only purpose of art is to produce magic. And it is video. Not film, not computers. Not reality, not virtual reality. No digits. It's fucking analogue. So it must be something else: virtual irreality perhaps. So this is what I thought of. I produce sound and image of sound and image of sound and image. Ad infinitum. And you are invited to walk around. Be in there and become an image of an image of an image of an image of a sound of a sound of a sound of a sound.
When was the last time you were aware of your physical influence on your acoustic environment? Was it strolling downtown with a Walkman playing the latest tunes, talking on your cellular, or did you actually notice your shadow on the pavement and hear the tapping of your feet? Who cares? This is artificial. This is TV man. This is 25 frames a second and you are part of it. You are object and subject. These moments of fame can last as long as you like. Just move. And you want to know what this is all about. Well, at a given moment, I became not obsessed, not interested, only fascinated by video: simultaneous recording of sound and image on a magneto-dynamic tape. No more, no less.

HOME

Solo exhibition Maco Ciciliani
15 – 18 April 2004

Different locations are nested in different sound-environments. Living in a densely populated area like Amsterdam's 'Bos en Lommer', I am at all times of the day surrounded by the sounds that can beheard through the walls from my neighbors. Most of them are sounds that are connected to daily lives, such as playing children, washing-machines, lawn-mowers etc. As these sounds originate from the context of private lives, they evoke a feeling of intimacy. Sounds of this kind would rarely be heard in an official building like a post office, a warehouse or a gallery. 
Placing the sounds that I record at home into Public Space With A Roof, I am creating a contrast between the character of a location and the sounds that originated elsewhere. Doing this, I aim to create a feeling of intimacy and privacy in an otherwise anonymous public building. 

STAND-BY

Solo exhibition Julie Dassaud
22 – 25 April 2004

The installation consists of projections of drawings. In these drawings, bodies are landscapes are bodies are landscapes are bodies are immaterial. The drawings reflect the gravity and anxiety of the current climate generated by war. Experienced from a distance, it feels like a quiet, steady, uavoidable happening, and yet a vaguely urgent will to act. The illusion of it all. You are in your living room fighting shadows and you are thinking it is ridiculous to fight shadows. You are in the street walking on shadows of bodies and you are thinking it could be your shadow. Bodies are decor. Stand by a landscape. Landscapes of bodies. How poetic. How pathetic.

For further details about Public Space With A Roof see pswar.org

Curating

Lucy Cotter holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. In her writing and curatorial projects, she approaches the exhibition space as a unique site for embodied-material-spatial knowledge-making, multi-sensory access, and cultural decolonization.

Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, with Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh, a solo exhibition in Venice comprising of an architectonic installation with new film works, engaging with tensions between the national image and suppressed histories. Cinema Olanda: Platform, a major group exhibition and event program at Kunstinstitut Melly, the Stedelijk Museum, and EYE Film Museum which brought these questions home to the Netherlands.

Cotter was Curator in Residence at Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR from 2021–22, curating the year-long program Turnstones (2022-3). Other recent presentations include Undoing Langauge: Early Performance by Brian O' Doherty at The Kitchen, New York (2021), and The Unknown Artist (2019) at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. She is currently curating the year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire (2024–5) as project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland, with additional events at venues across the US, including e-flux, New York; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans.

Her earlier projects include being co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, 2006–2008, a transnational artistic research project in six cities worldwide that explored possibilities for a more culturally responsive art discourse. She organized numerous exhibitions engaging with artistic research as head of the MA Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 2010-2015. Cotter has worked in various capacities at museums and galleries in Germany (Ludwigs Forum for Contemporary Art) and Italy (Peggy Guggenheim Museum and Nuova Icona Institute) and from 2003-4 was co-director of Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam.

Curatorial, Selected

SAMPLE CATALOGUES

How close is curatorial practice to the affinities and sensibilities of artists? Does curating seek to hold knowledge differently; does it work from art’s embodied material-conceptual processes? Does it swim in the direction of the unknown? Is it committed to fluidity, to play, and to serious reimagining? What are the continuities and discontinuities between artistic practice, academic inquiry, and curatorial practice? Does it embrace the exhibition’s potential to hold space for (neurodiverse, anti-ableist, anti-racist, gender-exploratory) forms of intelligence?