Bureau for Open Culture at Columbus College of Art & Design: Of Other Spaces

Mary Jo Bole, Michael Brown, Alain Bublex, Robert Buck, Gregory Crewdson, Dan Graham, Candida Höfer, Guillaume Leblon, Laura Lisbon, Gordon Matta-Clark, Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, Laurent Montaron, Marylène Negro, TJ Norris and Scott Wayne Indiana, Sarah Schönfeld, Maya Schweizer, Suzanne Silver, Christian Tomaszewski, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Jane and Louise Wilson

Curated by James Voorhies

Of Other Spaces explores how space affects human behavior and experience. The exhibition asks us to consider the ways in which spaces are charged with authority, and both serve and suppress our actions and ways of relating. The concept of "other spaces" is drawn from the philosophy of Michel Foucault, especially his thoughts on social relations and cultural practices expressed in the intersection of space, architecture, and history. In a rarely cited 1967 text by Foucault, entitled "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias," he introduces what he calls heterotopias—different or other spaces.

Hospitals, prisons, schools, libraries, museums, fairgrounds, cinemas, beaches, cemeteries, gardens, hotel suites, train stations, and even mirrors have the potential to be other spaces. Other spaces are essentially virtual. They function in accordance with personal memories, associations, experiences, and imaginings that one has of these very real sites. By making common practices strange, Foucault's writing often initiates conversations about habitual actions, in this case, in relation to space. The collection of works of art on exhibition and the reprinting of Foucault's text on "heterotopias" in the exhibition catalogue form the visual and philosophical catalyst for thinking about the function and meaning of space in everyday life.

Of Other Spaces continues a discussion on the origins, uses, histories, influences, and current and past activities that accompany our personal experiences of space.

128-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.


About the Bureau for Open Culture

Bureau for Open Culture at Columbus College of Art & Design is an exhibition-making philosophy that transcends traditional notions of exhibition display. It is an initiative that uses the gallery as a site for presenting thematic exhibitions, bringing together works of art to further knowledge about relationships with one another and with general concepts. The bureau also expands the exhibition model to include off-site projects, workshops, screenings, informal talks, publications, and short-term residencies. It embraces experimental and open approaches of supporting artistic and curatorial trajectories that responds to a multidisciplinary contemporary culture. Taking a position somewhere between a gallery and an alternative space, Bureau for Open Culture challenges traditional exhibition formats while respecting historical sources for those investigations.

Support for Bureau for Open Culture and Of Other Spaces has been provided by Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council, and a curatorial research grant by Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art.

Bureau for Open Culture
Columbus College of Art & Design
107 N. Ninth St.
Columbus, OH 43215
(614) 222-3270
http://www.bureauforopenculture.org