ANTWERP.- Hallo Halo Halot is a conversation between Galerie Halot, COUR, and GUSCH. A greeting—suggesting a moment of contact, a reverberation between worlds.
Hallo Halo Halot becomes its own kind of heterotopia—a temporary alignment of constructed scenes, shared surfaces, and spatial fragments that don’t quite settle—objects that hold contradictions, that are both real and removed, intimate and anonymous.
*
Heterotopias—a term coined by Michel Foucault in his 1967 essay Of Other Spaces. In Foucault’s thinking, heterotopias are real locations that exist outside normative societal structures, yet mirror, invert, or disrupt them. Examples include cemeteries, gardens, museums, ships—and notably, hotels. These are spaces marked by curated presence, transience, and layered meaning.
This exhibition brings together works that explore these themes through scale, geometry, and spatial tension—objects that embody the paradoxes of heterotopia: spaces that are both within and beyond the everyday.
Heterotopias are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” This idea resonates with the artistic gesture itself: placing fragments, scales, and temporalities into dynamic tension.
Another key figure in the exhibition is the/its étalage—the shop window—as both architectural feature and conceptual lens. Both public and intimate, theatrical and controlled, the étalage becomes a stage for our projections. Like the grand compositions of classical painting, it seduces through light, color, arrangement, and artifice. Even Marcel Duchamp found his Chocolate Grinder in an étalage.
COUR represents design-driven objects of singular value. Located on the historic Groenplaats in downtown Antwerp, COUR comprises a residential showroom, an outdoor exhibition space and a vitrine. Through concept-driven exhibitions, experimental publications and a constantly evolving collection of design collectibles curated by Milan Henderickx, COUR shapes new design narratives that unfold across multiple periods, genres and media, bridging past and present and seeding new concepts in the continuum of design history.
