Public Space With A Roof currently / upcoming / recently RELOCATED IDENTITIES I developed by Adi Hollander, Eva Fotidiadi, Tamuna Chabashvili and PSWAR team "When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. We claim that language acts, and acts against us, and the claim we make is a further instance of language, one which seeks to arrest the force of the prior instance. Thus, we exercise the force of language even as we seek to counter its force, caught up in a bind that no act of censorship can undo (...) The problem of injurious speech raises the question of which words wound, which representations offend, suggesting that we focus on those parts of language that are uttered, utterable, and explicit. (...) One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. (...) If the temporality of linguistic convention, considered as ritual, exceeds the instances of its utterance, and that excess is not fully capturable or identifiable (the past and future of the utterance can not be narrated with any certainty), then it seems that part of what constitutes the "total speech situation" is a failure to achieve a totalized form in any of its given instances. ..." Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative' (New York & London: Routledge, 1997) The first part of the project RELOCATED IDENTITIES, presented by Public Space With A Roof, is an exhibition on the overexposure of identity-related issues in art events. Can one ever represent overexposure without adding to it? Exhibition-making is always an articulation within the past, the present and the future of other articulations ­ of other exhibitions, of other exposures, of the totality of the themes/issues handled, of the people involved, of the vulnerability of those referred to. Eventually, of wounds that no exposure within an art-world context could ever claim to heal. At present, socio-politically engaged art appears to have become the victim of its own overexposure. To which extent has the excess of exhibitions on identity-related themes become a determining parameter, patronising the artists and issues curated? Could overexposure have engendered a negative impact on the meaning and the content of this engagement? Or even on the issues handled? Could art have any such power? Or could the context of its staging? The first phase of the project RELOCATED IDENTITIES has two main characteristics: Firstly, by unwarrantedly reflecting world news in the narrow understanding of identity as national origin, the project space "PSWAR" presentation includes renowned artists, whose national origin has constituted the principal contextualising and interpreting tool in many of the curatorial approaches, to which it has been exposed. Secondly, by staging all the typical "parallel events" of most contemporary art exhibitions - discussions, artistsą presentations, film screenings as well as archive materials from further identity-related art events - R.I. Part 1 asks to be considered as, and within, a "total speech situation". And in doing so, to depend/stake its "success" on the possibility of questioning its own contextualising and contextualised format.

Public Space With A Roof Overtoom 301 1054 HW Amsterdam The Netherlands pswar@xs4all.nl Public Space With A Roof is open from Thursday to Sunday 3 to 7 pm