HETETOTOPIA.EXE
Presented in November 2025
Garten studio – Berlin
With Lena Becerra, BINGS, Léa Bouton, Jack Carden, Nogan Camille Chevreau, Sarah Dubnà, Jonathan Esperester, Sarah Fuchs, Wolfgang Guenther, Jo Jakob Hübner, Avantika Khanna, Mariia Lutsak, Linda Marwan, Andrea Mikyska, Roxy Ruby, Azzam Salwaa, Mateusz Szymanowski
« The third space exists as a site of possibility, 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 follow a specific set of rules, like bars, prisons, nightclubs, or this exhibition space right here.
The need for third spaces arises from the failure of traditional structures to accommodate the complexity of human existence. As public spaces shrink under privatization, and as digital platforms increasingly mediate 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”. It 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.
You will discover here installations taking their aesthetics from video games, coded landscapes populated by 3D-printed hybrid creatures hovering between biology and imagination; and uncanny beings made of glass and steel, half deep-sea, half interplanetary, suggesting lives evolving in environments we can barely imagine.
You will walk through fragments of reverie; otherworldly landscapes where colors and shapes obey unfamiliar laws; distorted gardens of bodies and faces; curated and eerie domestic interiors; dreamscapes colliding with visions of post-internet Hells; and mirrors as paradoxical heterotopias offering, presence and absence at once. »
-Text by Louise Desplaces, curator of heterotopia.exe