Regionale 16: The Worlds They Wanted

Together with 8 other institutions, the HeK exhibits contemporary art from the tri-national region.

In “The Worlds They Wanted” artistic positions investigate and create hybrid spaces and personal realities in which the established reading of our world is skewed. In the short story „The World She Wanted“ (Philip K. Dick, 1953) Allison lives in a world created exclusively for her and which she can manipulate in every respect, so that even the unsuspecting Larry comes under her influence as a mere pawn in her world. As far as she is concerned there are lots of these individual worlds, superimposed on one another, a palimpsest of mutual influences. Ultimately, therefore, even Larry can make Allison’s world disappear to the benefit of his own world.

The works on show in the exhibition likewise reference the myriad of imbricated worlds that make up our reality. The days when it was possible to distinguish between digital and physical spaces, between fiction and reality, between factual and artificial worlds are long since gone. The possibilities spawned by technology make everything calculable and representable. Nothing is simply there any more. Anything can happen. Our understanding of the world and of ourselves is constantly broadening and, as a result, our own personalities and portrayals of them are broadening too. The artists in this group exhibition question the character of these worlds and the conditions prevailing in them; they analyze their power mechanisms and social canons; and they seek ways to (re-)configure these worlds to their own design. Their humorous, astonishing and thoughtful disruptions of our habitual perceptions of the world and of space conjure moments of irritation that open up new perspectives on our reality.