Ausstellung "Zum Paradies"

In the organizer's words:

"The Eyland must be a paradise."
Prince William of Nassau, 1842

With these words, Prince Wilhelm von Nassau described the Potsdam Havel landscape in 1842. The Villa Schöningen is still located in an environment that was itself designed as an ideal: The gardens along the Havel designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer are part of the so-called "Prussian Arcadia", a landscape in which nature was ordered, staged and shaped into the image of a harmonious life.

However, paradise is not only a place of longing, but also always a reflection of its time. To this day, we encounter the idea of paradise in advertising, film, literature, tourism and digital utopias. "To Paradise" asks where this idea has led us - both historically and in the present day.

The exhibition understands paradise not as a real place, but as a powerful idea that shapes landscapes, bodies and social orders. Interiors and gardens are closely intertwined. What appears in the house as a motif or narrative continues outside as a spatial experience.

At the beginning there is less an origin than a loss. In the pictorial tradition, paradise often appears as a memory of a state that has already disappeared. But this longing does not remain without consequences. Landscapes are designed, bodies are standardized and nature is transformed into images. For centuries, the female body in particular has been projected as a paradisiacal space: available, idealized and controlled. Contemporary works break up this order and shift paradise from a place of harmony to a space of social negotiation. Figures such as Lilith also undermine the idea of a peaceful origin and turn paradise into a contact zone of power, knowledge and gender relations.

At the same time, the idea of paradise lives on in images of idyllic landscapes - often in contrast to the ecological, political and colonial realities on which they are based. Especially in Potsdam, a place that has been shaped by changing political systems and borderline experiences, it is also evident how closely ideas of paradise are linked to social utopias. Both socialist visions of the future and Western promises of consumption and freedom created their own images of a "better life".

Today, paradise is shifting again. In the imagery of Silicon Valley and the developments of artificial intelligence, it increasingly appears as an optimized state: efficient, personalized and seemingly free of friction. Control does not disappear, but shifts to digital systems, data streams and algorithmic structures.

The exhibition unfolds a network of historical and contemporary positions. Motifs shift, overlap and enter into new contexts. In this way, paradise does not appear as a lost place, but as an idea that continues to shape our reality today.

Dr. Anne Daffertshofer and Pola van den Hövel

With works by Immanuel Birkert, CATPC, Annalee Davis, Philip Hudgson Dorrel, Esther Forse, Camila Ospina Gaitán, Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Martin Groß, Sonja Halbfass, Sarah Lehnerer, Marzia Migliora, Siobhan McLaughlin, Lisa Seebach, Oana Stanciu, Christin Kaiser, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Kiki Smith, Mischa Leinkauf and Ed Davenport