Mike Bourscheid, Giulia Cenci, Alex Da Corte, Stine Deja, Flaka Haliti, Monika Michalko, Tobias Spichtig, Of Other Places at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen

Of Other Places by Mike Bourscheid, Giulia Cenci, Alex Da Corte, Stine Deja, Flaka Haliti, Monika Michalko, Tobias Spichtig, curated by Hannah Eckstein, at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, 16/11/2025 – 22/03/2026.

What could be more real than a place that doesn’t exist? A space that mirrors our world like a funhouse mirror, not returning what we are, but what we might be, or what we’ve repressed. The moment you step into the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen and the city’s noise dissolves behind you, Foucault comes to mind, with his idea of “heterotopia.” But here, it’s not just a concept; it’s a slippery path, a series of rooms that feel like lucid dreams or gentle nightmares. I found myself wondering: can one place contain many without collapsing? Can reality withstand so many fractures, so many alternatives? The exhibition Of Other Places, curated by Hannah Eckstein, doesn’t offer answers. It suggests them. It whispers them.

The exhibition unfolds like a map without a legend. No center, no cardinal directions. One moves by pull or disorientation. The lighting is precise, never invasive, leaving room for shadows, not the physical kind, but conceptual ones. Each room pulses with a different temperature, as if moving through emotional microclimates: a sterile blue here, an earthy red there. The works don’t converse; they watch each other from a distance, like satellites in orbit, each with its own gravity.

Giulia Cenci welcomes us with spent bodies, fragile presences slumped in cold shower stalls, relics of a post-humanity. Their faces, part tribal mask, part digital artifact, seem caught in an enchanted sleep, not dreaming, but processing memory fragments. The echo of The Waste Land hums through this suspended flesh, a ruined world where the desire for rebirth is a mirage.

A few steps further, Flaka Haliti builds a wall. Not metaphorical, but real and sharp, pierced with letters that pose a brutally lucid question. The barriers become liminal, thresholds between dreams of return and the algorithms of exclusion. A shelter that’s also a prison. A gap that swallows certainty.

With Monika Michalko, we slip somewhere else entirely, an interdimensional trip where the floor itself tells stories. Paintings, furniture, walls, all melt into a single, pulsating surface, an interior landscape where volcanoes meet hybrid creatures. A total elsewhere, without boundaries, where fairy tale and reality don’t contradict but coexist.

Alex Da Corte orchestrates visual chaos with unsettling grace. His triptych reads like shards of pop culture and art history fused into one plane, not layered, but interwoven. Joan Brown and Sesame Street, irony and grief, myth and television. Da Corte doesn’t build collages; he builds visual synapses.

Stine Deja’s room is as cold as a morgue, yet alive with digital whispers. The “griefbots” speak from their metal coffins, synthetic laments drifting between birdsong and electronic glitch. This is mourning in the future, stylized, replicable, sharable. A promise of eternity that tastes like marketing.

Mike Bourscheid brings us back home, but comfort isn’t what he offers. Amid painted domestic backdrops and personal video clips, he explores, with grotesque tenderness, family roles, care, and emotional labor. Every object is a relic of affection, every costume a potential identity. Theatre becomes flesh.

Finally, Tobias Spichtig leads us to the ultimate threshold, the cemetery. But here, death is glamorous, grief cast in polished metal. His tombstones speak, not to commemorate, but to declare irreducible feelings. “I STILL LOVE YOU” reads like a song stuck on loop. As their metallic shine dulls and the colors of the sunrise blend into one another, what lingers is the fleeting sense that everything that passes once gleamed.

At the exit, no lesson awaits. Only an aftertaste. The electronic chime of a voice that was never alive but spoke, the silhouette of a limp body pressed to the glass, a phrase on the wall that I might have read in a dream. Of Other Places isn’t an exhibition to understand. It’s one to pass through. And perhaps to remember, when you think you’ve returned to the real world.