Heterotopia.exe – Group Exhibit at the Garten_Studios

The third space exists as a site of possibility. It is a threshold where contradictions are not erased but embraced. These spaces, described by Michel Foucault as heterotopias, are worlds within worlds, alternate realities suspended in tension with the normative. They are other, real-yet-unreal, and following a specific set of rules, like bars, prisons, nightclubs, or this exhibition space right here. 

“worlds within worlds”

The need for third spaces arises from the failures of traditional structures to accommodate the complexity of human existence. Public spaces are shrinking under privatization. Digital platforms are increasingly mediating our interactions. The creation of new third spaces offers a counterpoint. 

Heterotopia.exe unfolds as an activation and simulation of Foucault’s concept of “other spaces”, and opens it not as a static notion, but as an executable environment. In this exhibition, artworks are not only representations but portals, where reality is reprogrammed.

Here, you will discover installations with aesthetics drawn from video games. These include coded landscapes populated by 3D-printed hybrid creatures. They hover between biology and imagination. Visitors will also find uncanny beings made of glass and steel. They are half deep-sea, half interplanetary, suggesting lives evolving in environments we can barely imagine.

The exhibition is a walk through of fragments and reveries. Otherworldly landscapes draw colors and shapes obey unfamiliar laws, with distorted gardens and curated domestic interiors. Dreamscapes collide with visions of post-internet Hells. The viewer will encounter allegories for the infrastructures of control that we navigate daily and the invisible labor of care. Mirrors serve as paradoxical heterotopias, offering presence and absence at once.

The exhibition space is its own a world. It mirrors our contemporary art practices, questions and opens the space for dialogue, holds together universes that may otherwise seem incompatible. A space with its own temporality, suspending time for the short period the exhibition is on display and crystallizes in memories and through documentation. 

About the curator: 

Louise des Places is a curator, arts journalist, and former studio manager and gallery director. Over the years she has worked in several art residencies, foundations, museums and galleries in France, Belgium, Germany and Sweden; wrote for numerous publications; and organized curated exhibitions all around Europe as an independent curator.