Niklas Goldbach: The Paradise Machine

16. March 2024 - 11. August 2024 Dortmunder U, Level 3
105 days left

Architecture as a ‘paradise machine’ – this is the subject of Niklas Goldbach‘s first major survey exhibition in Germany. The ambivalent interrelationship between utopia and dystopia always plays a central role in his works.

For example, Into the Paradise Machine (2022) takes us to the artificial paradises of the Center Parcs, a chain of vacation parks in various European countries. The video recordings are combined with diary entries by the Dutch Center Parcs architect Jaap Bakema, which were written in 1943 in the German deportation camp Royallieu-Compiègne in northern France.

The exhibition design developed by the artist is also inspired by the architecture of the Center Parcs. The photo series Permanent Daylight (since 2013), which shows various utopian/dystopian architectures worldwide, is presented on the interior walls of the bungalows.

In 1550 San Remo Drive (2017), Niklas Goldbach visits the house in Pacific Palisades that the German writer Thomas Mann had built in exile in California in 1942. And in A Date with Destiny (2019), the artist travels to California‘s Salton Sea, once a “miracle in the desert”, now an ecological disaster.

The exhibition brings together video and photographic works from the last ten years and presents three new productions created especially for this exhibition.

Niklas Goldbach (*1973 in Witten) works with video and photography. He is based in Berlin. www.niklasgoldbach.de

Credit Header: Niklas Goldbach, Tropicarium Frankfurt, 2023, from the series “Permanent Daylight”, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024, Design: Ten Ten Team

You will find press material on this program item in our press area.

Events

Artist

Niklas Goldbach

Curator

Inke Arns

Event programme in German (PDF)

Booklet - Artwork Descriptions (PDF)

Press Reviews

“Utopia meets Dystopia. The exhibition poetically stages the correlation between high-level aims and inevitable decay.” (08 April 2024, trailer ruhr)

“Goldbach explores resorts all over the world with his camera. [...] But the bitter realization of the exhibition is this: paradise can neither be bought nor be built.” (08 April 2024, WAZ)

“Daniela Berglehn: 'What is paradise for you? Niklas Goldbach: 'That's difficult. I think we look for the untouched, we feel that the unshaped is a paradise. But there is always the desire to create. And great things are created. It's a dilemma. The longing, it doesn't stop.'” (03 April 2024, Daniela Berglehn in conversation with Niklas Goldbach, Monopol Magazin)

“Paradise is a building site - at least that's the impression that visitors to the new exhibition by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund's U Construction fences and palm trees line an exhibition route consisting of wobbly walls. And paradise? It stands on at least as shaky a foundation. [...]Goldbach's paradise is a paradise without a net and with a false bottom.” (31 March 2024, Nordstadtblogger)

“Paradise is empty because the season hasn't started yet. The Center Parcs bungalows lie deserted under bare winter trees. The camera moves across the standardised facades, later through the standardised bedrooms and kitchens. This is what the tourism industry's promise of happiness looks like.” (26 March 2024, Westfälischer Anzeiger)

“The artist, who was born in Witten in 1973 and now lives in Berlin, deals with the beautiful but also dark sides of architecture in his photographic and video works and has also designed the exhibition architecture on the third floor.” (21 March 2024, Ruhrnachrichten)

"How do people imagine paradise? If we leave out the biblical idea of the Garden of Eden for a moment, a South Sea island with a blue sea and white sandy beach will certainly often appear in the mind's eye. In his work "A State of Happiness", Niklas Goldbach takes real images from the real bathing landscapes of Center Parcs and lets an artificial intelligence (AI) process the images. Surprisingly, the AI quickly turns the paradisiacal dream into a ruin. Decay is apparently always included in the calculation." (16 March 2024, Ars Tremonia)

Photo Gallery – Opening

Photo Gallery – Exhibition