Of Other Places

Michel Foucault describes heterotopias as ‘other places’, as real and effective places that are drawn into the fabric of society: counter-places or counterpoints, utopias that have actually been realised, in which the real places within culture can be represented, contested and reversed, as it were. For they deviate from the social order, are spaces of transition, of otherness or subversion. However, Foucault’s heterotopias are never utopian in the classical sense, because they are real, but ‘outside all places’.
In Of Other Places, Mike Bourscheid, Giulia Cenci, Alex Da Corte, Stine Deja, Flaka Haliti, Monika Michalko and Tobias Spichtig create their artistic universes in their own exhibition rooms. These rooms are understood in Foucault’s sense as places of ‘another order’. As real counter-places that open up alternative realities. Each artistic creation represents a self-contained cosmos with its own rules, atmospheres and contexts beyond familiar parameters. They exist side by side and form a network of parallel realities that mirror, contrast or overwrite the world as we know it – condensed, fragmentary, poetic or even disturbing.
The artists draw on personal as well as collective experiences, from the past and present as well as from a possible future. However, their heterotopias are not understood as a mere escape from reality, but as spaces of possibility in which alternatives can be tested and contradictions experienced. For they transport us into unexpected spheres and create something different within the familiar, in which alternative stories, bodies, times, orders and emotions can be experienced.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, November 15, 2025, 6 p.m.
As part of the Long Nights of Museum

Curator: Hannah Eckstein
Curatorial Assistant: Marisa Zeising

Supported by