Transpositions

Since French philosopher Michel Foucault’s coining of the term “heterotopia1, it has become a key notion in the understanding of space and a focus of discussion in contemporary discourse. Heterotopia is a form of spatial organization situating several spaces in a single locus that emerge concurrently in different modes, side by side, together,in proximity, at a distance, in opposition. In the last decades of the 20th century Foucault explored the historical transition of human thought from a linear temporal axis to an intersecting network that links virtual places and real places together and in parallel form, akin to systems of signs where the human environment affects the totality of intricate relationships and inherent contradictions. The exhibition Transpositions explores the links between works of art and a current reality stratified with cultural, social, political, architectural and geographic contexts.
It resembles a travelogue that moves between the network nodes and an arrangement of changing, shifting spaces. Traveling through the various spaces, one may experience interactions, dialogues, dilemmas, insights and confrontations that empty and charge the work at the same time. The accidental tourist – the viewer – becomes a major element, influencing and being influenced in terms of containment of the various visual arrays. The works offer a solution of sorts, a type of vision, a clinging; survival capacity alongside pointlessness and diminution. Collective memory is absorbed in local autobiographical experiences, whether borrowed or invented.
See Michel Foucault, Heterotopia, Translation: Ariella Azoulay (Tel Aviv, Resling 2003)