Design Art Papers 2025 | No. 13

Cristina URSACHE Rethinking the Body. Curating the Human Form in Contemporary Visual Art Exhibitions / The relationship between contemporary art and historic environments is no longer defined merely by contrast between old and new, permanence and ephemerality but by processes of reconnection. In this context, the human bodyemergesasacrucialmediatorbetweenthemateriality of heritage and the speculative potential of contemporary artistic practice. The body is both a historical archive and an anticipatory form, it remembers, performs, and projects. Exhibitions that stage the body not simply as a subject of representation but as a spatial and philosophical interface offer fertile ground for rethinking curatorial methodologies. The exhibition Utopian Body by artist Claudiu Ciobanu, presented at Artep Gallery, exemplifies how corporeality can be reimagined beyond biological constraint as an architectural entity, a site of longing, and a speculative blueprint for future forms of existence. Through its use of fragmented anatomy, suspended forms, and shadowed spatiality, the exhibition transforms the body into both a presence and a question, both materially grounded and conceptually absent. This study argues that the body can serve as a bridge between historical continuity and utopian projection. The central question guiding this paper is therefore: How can curatorial practice reimagine the human body as a spatial and philosophical interface between heritage and futurity, between what persists and what is yet to come? Keywords / curatorial practice; spatial epistemology; embodied space; posthuman aesthetics; Summary / This paper explores how curating the human form in contemporary visual art exhibitions can generate new critical relations between corporeality, space, and heritage. Taking the exhibition Utopian Body by Claudiu Ciobanu (Artep Gallery, 2024), curated by the author, as a point of departure, it investigates how artistic practices translate Michel Foucault’s philosophical reflections fromUtopian Body (1966) into visual and spatial experiences. The paper situates the exhibition within the broader discourse connecting contemporary arts and historic environments, arguing that the curatorial act can function as an epistemological tool for rethinking the body not only as a subject of representation but as a living interface between memory and imagination. Through analytical reflection on aesthetics and curatorial methodologies, the study proposes that the exhibition format becomes a medium of philosophical speculation where the body, displaced yet grounded, operates as both archive and utopia of human experience. In his 1966 radio lecture Le corps utopique , Michel Foucault proposes a paradoxical definition of the body: it is both the most concrete and most impossible place. The body, he argues, is the origin of all utopias, yet it is also what every utopia attempts to escape. It is a prison finite, vulnerable, aging but also the very site from which the imagination of transcendence begins. [1] Foucault famously describes the body as a „non-place” (non-lieu), a location that is always elsewhere from itself. It is visible, yet fundamentally inaccessible, intimate, yet estranged. [2] This notion anticipates contemporary discourses on posthumanism, performativity, and spatial politics. The body, in Foucault’s reading, is always „here and elsewhere,” always negotiating between its physical confinement and its symbolic dispersal through mirrors, art, architecture, and memory. For curatorial practice, this has profound implications: to exhibit a body is never simply tomake it visible. It is to reveal its absence, its displacement, its projection into utopian and speculative dimensions. Exhibitions thus becomewhat Foucault calls „heterotopias” spaces that hold together what reality keeps apart. Claudiu Ciobanu’s exhibition Utopian Body, presented at Artep Gallery, operates precisely in the liminal space described by Foucault: a space in which the body is simultaneously anchored in its materiality and projected beyond itself. Rather than depicting the body in a figurative 273