Estelle van den Heever’s exhibition, Private Logic, consists of an installation piece, a video piece and a series of photographic prints that are installed so as to set up a relationship between the everyday and the bizarre, public and private, the “in-group” and the “out-group”. The works function as interventions that reflect and subvert the familiar discursive formation of society.  

The exhibition comprises a body of work that explores how space, objects and identity produce and reflect one another. The work is mainly object-based and explores the influence of objects on the self in terms of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’ writing. The artist aims to show that we can open ourselves to new possibilities that transcend the dichotomy of physical reality and subjective experience, which means that we create spaces that provide the ideal escape from our present which we regard as insufficient and inadequate. The artworks furthermore illustrate how identity functions in the suspended state between reality and madness, creating “heterotopias” or “other spaces.” Heterotopias function as enclosed spaces within a larger framework and could be regarded as ‘safe’ environments. The construction of such non-places or heterotopias implicates reality itself as a construct: in Baudrillard’s words, ‘(t)he impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.’ (Simulacra and simulations, Baudrillard 1994:19).  

Aleatory objects

Installation of Private Logic