From November 16th, 2025 to March 22nd, 2026, the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen is showing the large-scale group exhibition Of Other Places. Based on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as ‘other places,’ the exhibition brings together works by Mike Bourscheid, Giulia Cenci, Alex Da Corte, Stine Deja, Flaka Haliti, Monika Michalko, and Tobias Spichtig. Of Other Places presents artistic spaces that deviate from the social order and open up alternative realities. Each artistic position unfolds its own universe with its own rules, atmospheres, and contexts as real counter-locations in which familiar structures are reflected, shifted, and rethought. Thus, Foucault’s ‘real, effective places’ become spaces of experience of the possible, in which contradictions, emotions, and stories beyond familiar patterns can be experienced.
In Giulia Cenci’s installation dry salvages (2022), fragile-looking bodies with mask-like faces hang and lean in shower cubicles. Their eyes are closed, their bodies limp, as if they were in a ghostly sleep of a post-human future. The title refers to T.S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages. However, the installation also references Eliot’s The Waste Land, which addresses transience, human powerlessness and the longing for renewal in a fragmented, exhausted world. A reality that is as valid for the present as it is for Giulia Cenci’s dry salvages.
In If I Want to Go Home Will Robots Send Me Somewhere Else? (2021), Flaka Haliti erects a massive wall of corrugated iron reminiscent of containers or temporary refugee shelters. The title, set in punched-out letters, is an adaptation of an online question and refers to alienation, control and belonging. The work opens up an interspace in which boundaries can be experienced as social constructs and the relationship between inside and outside, reality and imagination, is renegotiated.
Monika Michalko transports viewers into a universe of intense colours and complex compositions. Her surreal images, featuring organic and geometric forms, fauna, flora, volcanoes, mountains and urban structures, create a fantastical refuge in the space, covering the floor and walls with murals, painted furniture and other installative interventions. Everything intertwines to create an ‘other place’ where viewers are immersed in a fairy-tale setting that, while containing reality, nevertheless suspends all familiar laws.
Alex Da Corte’s triptych A Boom, Overheard, Overhead (2023) unfolds a complex pictorial space in which visual art, popular culture and personal memory overlap. The three panels combine art-historical references and mass media image sources, such as Sesame Street and a painting by Joan Brown. Da Corte’s canvas can no longer be experienced as a closed, illusionistic pictorial space, but rather as an open field of thought: a visual heterotopia in which heterogeneous references are not juxtaposed additively, but intertwined in a common system.
In Grave Matters (2025), Stine Deja leads viewers into a futuristic space where nature, technology and death merge. Birdsong and electronically distorted sounds accompany metal coffins with digital avatars, so-called griefbots, which give the dead a voice. Stine Deja reveals a shift in our collective memory in which memories become fluid, commercialisable and perhaps even negotiable. A counter-space in which the promise of eternal return is as enticing as the fear of final erasure.
Mike Bourscheid combines reality and fiction in his installation Sunny Side Up and Other Sorrowful Stories (2021) and the short film Agnes (2023). Between a painted terraced house backdrop and everyday objects, an auto-fictional narrative unfolds about family, care and role models. Humour and vulnerability make the quiet gestures of everyday life palpable. Costumes and other props connect the film and the installation to form a theatrical stage in which identities, memories and emotions can be experienced, allowing the viewers to become a part themselves.
Tobias Spichtig leads us to the heterotopia par excellence. He takes us to a cemetery, a place strictly separated from life, where we are confronted with our own mortality like nowhere else. On a reflective black stage floor covered with footprints three shiny metallic gravestones are installed with the inscriptions ‘ALL I NEVER WANTED, ‘I STILL LOVE YOU’ and ‘A STAR IN THE SKY’. Images show abstract mountains, a sunrise, a ballerina dancing on a stage and other female figures. While the cemetery embodies a special form of temporality in which the flow of life stands still, life and death intertwine in Spichtig’s work. When the metallic sheen of the gravestones becomes dull and the colours of the sunrise flow into one another, what remains is the fleeting notion that everything that passes once shone brightly.
