Architecture as a “paradise machine”—this is the subject of Niklas Goldbach’s first major exhibition in Germany providing an overview of his art. The ambivalent interrelationship between utopia and dystopia always plays a key role in his works.

His project Into the Paradise Machine (2022), for example, takes us on a journey into the artificial paradise of Center Parcs, a chain of vacation parks in various European countries. The video recordings are combined with diary entries by the Dutchman and later Center Parcs architect Jaap Bakema. He wrote them in 1943 in the German deportation camp Royallieu-Compiègne in northern France. In Goldbach’s video, a voice reads the diary entries while video recordings of the Center Parcs bungalows are shown, resulting in a hallucination-like blurring of the camp in Compiègne and the vacation parks.

The exhibition architecture developed by the artist also takes its inspiration from the Center Parcs architecture and is extensively documented in the book. The photo series Permanent Daylight (since 2013), which shows a variety of utopian and dystopian architectures around the world, is presented on the interior walls of the bungalows.

This publication unites video and photographic works from the last ten years and showcases three major new productions that were created especially for the exhibition at the HMKV.