Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. Spatial Emotion in Art and Architecture

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.

Curated by Adam Budak and Heike Munder