Experience Traps

Experience Traps takes you for a walk through the baroque garden. During the seventeenth century, gardens were designed to surprise and delight with their spectacle. They were places for social encounters but also forums for education and political discussion. The baroque garden was conceived to overwhelm its visitors' senses, to impress, persuade and subtly manipulate.

The path through the garden of the Middelheim Museum leads us along the work of sixteen contemporary artists who, via their own particular approaches, give personal and critical readings of baroque landscape architecture. Along the way, we pass different elements characteristic of the baroque: from the maze and the fountain, to the grotto and the trompe-l'oeil. Inspired by the exhibition, the Experience Traps book portrays, through dynamic means, a turbulent world full of contradictions, eclecticism and theatricality, designed to move both visitor and reader.

Published for the exhibition Experience Traps at Middelheim Museum Antwerp, 1th June until 23rd September 2018, co-published by Motto Books.

William Forsythe (USA) is a contributing artist and co-curator. Other artists include Mike Bouchet (US), Monster Chetwynd (UK), Jeremy Deller (UK), Spencer Finch (US), Gelatin (A), Ryoji Ikeda (JP), Bertrand Lavier (FRA), Louise Lawler (US), Bruce Nauman (US), Recetas Urbanas (ESP), Monika Sosnowska (PL), Adrien Tirtiaux(BE), Dennis Tyfus (BE), Andra Ursuta (RO) and Ulla von Brandenburg (D).