Niklas Goldbach: The Paradise Machine
16. March 2024 - 01. September 2024 Dortmunder U, Level 3
extended until 1 September 2024
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.
Artist
Niklas Goldbach
Curator
Inke Arns
Magazine
The exhibition magazine as a free bilingual PDF can be downloaded here – the printed version is available on site at the HMKV bookshop and can be ordered via Verlag Kettler.
Event programme in German (PDF)
Booklet - Work Descriptions
Press Reviews
“The exhibition at the HMKV presents the promises of salvation of this well-oiled ideological paradise machine in neutral and thus reveals its repressed historical-materialistic flipside in all its brutal banality.” Thorsten Schneider, KUNSTFORUM International, Vol. 297 August 2024.
“Small paradises, they exist, unexpectedly under some bends, that's what we take with us from this tour in Dortmund.” Peter Backof about the bike excursion on 20.07.2024, WDR 3 - Kultur am Mittag, 22.07.2024
“This desolate landscape in which Goldbach’s photographs—either framed or fixed on soft board—act as interior decor or outdoor messages is disturbing enough, even more so when we realize that it’s pristine. It lacks any trace of past human presence and feels like a social experiment in the making.” Krzysztof Kosciuczuk in Camera Austria, Nr. 166
“It‘s clever how he puts a work from 2022 about the Center Parcs, which are widely spread throughour Europe, into the focus of the exhibition. [...] Goldbach‘s perspective remains neutral, but in all works it becomes apparent that there‘s a fine line between Utopia and Dystopia.” kunst:art Nr. 15, May/June 2024
“For a while now, Schneider has been doing soundtracks for movies as well, and for that reason the choice was very simple to include him into the the video work “INTO THE PARADISE MACHINE”.” Niklas Goldbach‘s interview with kaput-Magazin (29 April 2024, kaput)
“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)
