Public Space With A Roof cordially invites you


Beauty Unrealized: spider webs of personal universes seeking a form


Saturday, March 10, 2007

7 pm: Opening:

Adam Avikainen, Breathe the same breath, video

Catherine Sullivan: The Chittendens
(The work will be shown only on March 10, 7 - 10 pm)


Sunday, March 11, 2007

2 pm: Francesco Bernardelli, The Secret Ordeal of Beauty: film program

> 2 pm: Symbolist aggregations
Fireworks (1947) di Kenneth Anger – 15´
Baudelaire (C.Mollino) by Elisa Sighicelli – 1´
Written on The Wind (1956) by Douglas Sirk – 99´

BREAK

> 4.30 pm
Scorpio Rising (1963) by Kenneth Anger - 29´
Harley-Davidson (1970) (Serge Gainsbourg) sung by Brigitte Bardot (video-clip) - 3'
Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) by Jack Cardiff - 90´

Surrealist phantoms, fantasies and entropy (or the dissolution of matter)
Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991) by Stan Brakhage - 8'19"
Decasia (2001) by Bill Morrison - 70´



About the research project Beauty Unrealized

The sixth part of Beauty Unrealized focuses on cinematic images and the possibility of crossing the boundaries between cinema and other media, as well as the possibilities to break the limits of the cinematic medium itself. In his works, Adam Avikainen examines possibilities of expanding the cinematic moment into different materials and media, proposing a personal reinterpretation of cinema techniques and objectives. From her side, Catherine Sullivan translates the theatrical into the cinematic and vice versa in order to investigate the limits of both. At the same time, Sullivan marks the division line between the individual and the universal, revealing where the Self ends and the cultural patterns begin. Through his selection of videos and films, Francesco Bernardelli presents a different vision of the images in order to enlarge our field of visual experience and disturb dominant regimes of the vision as "manifestations of dominant ideology of Form and Control."

As a framework for the whole project, we created a special library in which visitors can enter and get lost in the world of thoughts, ideas, questions, possibilities, and puzzles. For this library, we invited numerous individuals (artists, filmmakers, writers, theoreticians, etc.) to submit items that have significantly influenced them and their work.

Inspired by Aby Warburg, this library is “a collection of questions” rather than “a repository of books, (…) involving not objects but the tension, analogies, contrasts, or contradictions among them”. Its inside will be used to host six separate exhibitions where the invited artists will present their past works, works in progress, or works produced especially for this project.

Like the majority of the PSWAR projects, Beauty Unrealized combines an exhibition with an accompanying series of talks, lectures, public debates, and a reader. This is the fourth and final project of the second phase of the work of PSWAR, the result of questions and problems that have arisen from the previous projects. We regard it as a closing of an imaginary circle, which is why we have invited all the artists who participated in the history of PSWAR to be a part of its closure.


Adam Avikainen, Breathe same breath

video, 9 minutes
Adam Avikainen's work can be seen as an on-going investigation of the potentialities of storytelling, both on a formal and content level. By applying a cinematic treatment to scripts and physical installations, the artist proposes whimsical fictions and self-made mythologies that act as raptures in the reality.
For Beauty Unrealized Avikainen presents "Breathe same breath": a video, which reveals the the artist's ironic attitude towards the world, and his intention to create experiences 'between revelation and reason'.

Description: "A man gets into one of those jets with the people pacing up and down the aisles trying to sell you jasmine infused breast milk and flies to North America in search of his internet lover. Instead, he discovers a dipsomaniacal sailor slurping songs of cicadas. A post-transcendental walkabout. A square dance under the harvest moon with Caspar David
Friedrich, Flannery O'Connor, Henry David Thoreau and Polly Jean Harvey." (A.A.)



Catherine Sullivan: The Chittendens
Multiple projection, 16 mm film transferred to video

Catherine Sullivan, initially trained as an actress, is best known for theatre and video works in which she explores the conventions of performance and role playing, using a wide range of historical and cultural references. Sullivan investigates tensions between performers, their roles and their audience, as well as the discrepancies between role, person and body. The Chittendens, a six screen video installation shows sixteen actors playing stereotypes from nineteenth and twentieth-century America through the emotional patterns given by Sullivan. Using the grammar of theater, Sullivan successfully reveals culturally inscribed ways of coding gesture and ultimately the defining patterns of the self. The Chittendens was made in collaboration with composer Sean Griffin, who wrote the score for the video which Sullivan re-edited afterwards, thus creating the formal dialogue between the actors' gestures and the music score.
The work will be shown only on March 10, 7 - 10pm (in Studio 1&2, OT301)


Francesco Bernardelli, The Secret Ordeal of Beauty
(Film screening with introduction)
"The Secret Ordeal of Beauty" is an attempt to escape predictable, linear connections in order to refer to a hidden ambiguity and a substantial treachery of the images. Within a short span of time, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, the increasingly intermingled social, sexual, political and aesthetic representations offered alternatives to the traditional and rather conservative structures of the cinema machine. By repeatedly fusing supernatural elements and concerns with issues of psycho-sexual drama and images of sexual ambiguity, many marginal forms and cycles of narratives (such as horror, erotic and fantastic) have actually facilitated a shift from a predetermined view of moving images' characters towards a full call into question of established gender roles, power relations and ideological structures.
Francesco Bernardelli is a freelance art critic and curator based in Torino, Italy. Since 1999 he has curated film and video programs for Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum. He has recently catalogued the video collections of Castello di Rivoli and published essays on the historical connections between early performance, video art and experimental dance. Recent projects include Split Subjects (De Appel, Amsterdam 2005) and Figures of Excess (Beursschouwburg, Brussels, 2006).


The project consists of 6 parts from January to April 2007
Opening dates: January 13, January 29, February 10, February 24, March 10, March 24


Project initiated by: Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander, and Vesna Madzoski
Guest curator: Angela Serino
Assistant: Mathijs Lieshout


Library installation created by: Tamuna Chabashvili and Adi Hollander
Constructed by: Mathijs Lieshout, Davide Manzoni and Maurice Bogaert
Advising architect: Ofri Earon




The project is kindly supported by: ‘Cine Qua Non’ film shop, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, VSB Fonds, Mondriaan Foundation


Location: Public Space With a Roof, Overtoom 301, 1054 HW Amsterdam.
During the exhibition the project space is open Thursday to Sunday 3pm - 7pm or by appointment.

For further questions please email to pswar@xs4all.nl or consult our website http://www.pswar.org

………………………………………………………

Public Space With A Roof
Is a non-profit, artist-run project space
located in the old Film Academy, OT301
Overtoom 301,
1054 HW Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: pswar@xs4all.nl
http://www.pswar.org

For an appointment you can reach us by email or call:
Tel: +31 (0) 611174239, Tel: +31 (0) 628128003