Heterotopia

Heterotopia is Foucault’s post-structuralist concept referring to a space that exists in relation to other spaces, reflecting, subverting, or contesting their conditions. These uncanny spaces, which juxtapose diverse spaces and times within a single site, effectively encapsulate the shift from traditional temporality to a more spatialised experience of time in contemporary culture. This shift is significant as it challenges the traditional dichotomy between past and present, with the past continuously reactivated and reinterpreted within the spatial-temporal matrix of the present. As a result, we find ourselves enmeshed in an endless now, unable to distinguish past events as past or project ourselves into the future.

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     Within this framework, memory has emerged as a central keyword across various discursive contexts. Memory now privileges fluidity and hybridity over fixed identities, as time becomes an experiential, spatial phenomenon—constantly conjuring both the experienced and unexperienced past as something immediately present, resembling the mechanism explained by Marianne Hirsch or Jacque Derrida as postmemory and hauntology. In this way, heterotopia provides a setting where memories are continuously performed and renegotiated, offering a site of critical reflection on the shifting conditions of contemporary temporality.

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    Francesca Hummler’s dollhouse operates as a microcosmic heterotopia, encapsulating layered temporalities and inherited narratives. Each room and object bears traces of family members across generation—from her great-grandparents to her parents—now extended through Francesca’s own hand. By orchestrating the bodily insertion of her adopted sister Masantu into the space, Francesca introduces a figure who exists outside the biological lineage. This performative gesture—both tender and resistive—disrupts the linearity of inheritance and introduces a rupture within the familial scrip. The dollhouse, once a vessel for memory, is transformed into a heterotopic site of critical engagement where, memory, identity, and temporal-spatial relations collide.

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       Ivana Vozalj’s diptych introduces visual cues that collapse multiple temporalities—drawing on the myth of Icarus, misty Venetian landscapes, and the iconic imagery of Elvis’s 1968 Comeback Special jacket. Her visual language is grounded in the contemporary, yet it deliberately mimics the aesthetic codes of analogue photography—light leaks, faded colours, cinematic framing—to evoke a sense of belatedness and spectral familiarity. These vintage photographic effects are not stylistic flourishes, but conceptual tools: they signal the distance between past and present while simultaneously collapsing them. In doing so, Ivana transforms the canvas into a heterotopic space where history circulates not linearly, but recursively—filtered, distorted, and re-performed through the logic of image culture. Nostalgia, here, is neither sentimental nor passive, but a critical mode of engaging with how memory is constructed and consumed in late capitalist visual regimes.

 

     While Francesca destabilizes the intimate narrative of familial heritage through performative photographic staging, Ivana engages the collective formation of memory shaped by the reproduction and circulation of historical imagery. Together, their practices situate memory within heterotopic spaces—sites where inherited narratives are disrupted and reassembled. By invoking the camera both as a literal medium and as a conceptual device for framing time, the exhibition complicates linear understandings of history, offering a critical reflection on how memory is constructed, spatialised, and felt in the contemporary moment.

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See the Exhibition Reader to learn more about each artist’s practice, conceptual frameworks, and artistic references.

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