Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Spatial Emotion in Contemporary Art and Architecture
22/03/2003 - 25/05/2003
Migros Museum
Limmatstrasse 270
CH-8005 Zürich
Tue/Wed/Fri 12 am – 6 pm
NEW: Thu 12 – 8 pm
Sat/Sun 11 am – 5 pm
Tel +41 1 277 20 50
Fax +41 1 277 62 86
info@migrosmuseum.ch
www.migrosmuseum.ch
Press Conference: Friday, 21st March 2003, 10.30 am
Opening: Friday, 21st March 2003, 6.00 pm
Knut Asdam (DK) – Monica Bonvincini (I) – Christoph Büchel (CH) –
James Casebere (USA) – Aziz+Cucher (USA) – Jan Dibbets (NL) – Urs Fischer (CH)
- H.R. Giger (CH) – Katarzyna Jozefowicz (PL) – Anish Kapoor (GB) – Daniel
Libeskind (USA)- Jane and Louise Wilson (GB) – Paul Noble (GB) – Gordon
Matta-Clark (USA) – Paul Thek (USA) – Markus Schinwald (A) – Monika
Sosnowska (PL) – Low-Architecture (CH) – Stephen Willats (GB) – Matthias
Müller (D)
Every story is a travel story, a spatial practice. Narrative structures
like our lives are spatial syntaxes, and their network contains a
vertiginous multiplicity of spatial trajectories and metaphors. The
present epoch has been proclaimed as the epoch of space; we are in the
epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of side-by-side, of
dispersed. Connections and intersections are our everyday experience.
Space seems to have appropriated us, and to have possessed and
determined our psychophysical states of acting and being. Everything seems to be
spatialised and space has become the dominant feature of daily life: in
a prison space we are trapped between a torture chamber and
pleasure-palace, between fascination and lament.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure three contexts in which
space occupies a central position: Sigmund Freud’s notion of
“das Unheimliche” and psychoanalytical elaboration of space and its
emotion; Michel Foucault’s other spaces – heterotopias and their
counter-site qualities of socio-political implications; and Walter Benjamin’s
outmoded and repressed space with all its auratic traces (fake or authentic) of
philosophical and historic charge.
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” aims to exploit the
psychological associations of space with its multiplicity of emotional overtones,
mapping its extremes and its psychic environment. Focusing on spatial
pathologies (agoraphobia, vertigo, claustrophobia…), the exhibition
identifies space as a cause of mental disorder, fear or estrangement,
ultimate trauma. Hysteria, panic and neurosis overlap with other spatial
stories of psychic unrest and unease: distortions and perversions
(warped space); anxiety and enigmas (haunted space); spatial inconvenience and
discomfort, perfectly domestic and yet alienating; space half-spoken,
half-pronounced: a promise, a puzzle, a magic spell, temptation.
Curators: Heike Munder, Zurich, & Adam Budak, Krakow.
This project is part of Re:Location. Produced by migros museum für
gegenwartskunst, Zürich & Centre for Contemporary Art Bathhaus,
Gdansk.
The migros museum für gegenwartskunst is an institution of the Migros Culture Percentage.