Niklas Goldbach: The Paradise Machine

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 (b. 1973 in Witten) works with video and photography. He is based in Berlin.

Curator: Inke Arns (Director HMKV)