HETEROTOPIA | KARINE LAVAL

Karine Laval (Paris) is a French American multidisciplinary artist. Her practice encompasses various forms of expression, including photography, video, projections, public art, and immersive installations, aiming to challenge our ordinary perception of the world.
Laval’s artworks are deeply connected to the natural world while always retaining a human element, often represented by something that has been artificially constructed.
Laval’s exploration specifically focuses on “urban nature,” meaning vegetation that has emerged and grown in close proximity to human activity. In simple terms, urban gardens, both private and public.

Heterotopia is a series of images created between 2014 and 2019, in which the artist combines analog and digital techniques. The title of the series derives from a term coined by the philosopher Michel Foucault, who used the word “heterotopia” to describe “spaces of otherness,” places that can be simultaneously physical and mental, encompassing different sites that cannot be combined in other ways.
An example of this is the image reflected in a mirror, which also serves as the key element in Laval’s project: the artist experiments by placing this object within the chosen setting, creating an interplay of illusory reflections where images merge and overlap. These are then photographed and digitally altered, ultimately becoming the artwork—a landscape with a hallucinatory appearance that seems both familiar and surreal.
Heterotopia #63 reveals a small portion of what appears to be a courtyard: several cacti emerge from a gravel-covered ground; the vegetation is presented in three different colors—red, blue, and green—vivid, brilliant hues that intentionally correspond to the digital color model.
Laval experiments with light, color, and perception in an effort to reach a parallel dimension, using abstraction as an alternative form of representing reality.

The serial numbering of the artworks composing Heterotopia further suggests a cataloging approach, as if Laval were documenting the locations and environments of a surreal world she has discovered, a hallucination to unveil and share with everyone.

18/01/25

HETEROTOPIA | KARINE LAVAL

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