Willkommen im Paradies

The world is changing: between global catastrophes and rapid technological progress, humankind is creating new digital spaces for dreams and utopias.

What does it mean to be human in this new world, and what if this dream landscape becomes a nightmare?

The exhibition Willkommen im Paradies (Welcome to Paradise) at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf is an immersive, interactive project that transports visitors into fictional worlds between utopia and dystopia. The exhibition is curated und designed by Alain Bieber (artistic director of NRW-Forum) and Vesela Stanoeva. From 27 August 2021 to 9 January 2022, visitors can engage in an artistic experiment and a multisensory experience.

Willkommen im Paradies 🌴 takes visitors on a media art trail of installations and virtual realities over 1,200 square metres. As they walk through the transmedia, narrative exhibition architecture, they face tasks and engage with artistic works on new forms of spirituality, digital rituals and the question of physicality in the virtual. The exhibition offers visitors a transformative artistic and personal experience in which fiction, science, art, technology and their own emotions and fantasies meet. At the end of the journey, paradise awaits—or does it?

Scentcommunication developed a fragrance for the exhibition. The company works with scents and flavors that one use to identify and rate one's surrounding. Places rooms and humans are often connected to an unique scent.

Willkommen im Paradies (Welcome to Paradise) is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and is part of the MARTA project, supported by funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). MARTA is a joint research project by the Hochschule Düsseldorf, the media technology company Tennagels, the Lavalabs agency and the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf that will produce further artistic and technological works. The exhibition was also supported by funds from the District Government of Düsseldorf.

FEATURING

A.A Murakami, Martin Backes, Hazel Brill, Christian Bröer, Sandrine Deumier, Barbara Herold & Florian Huth, Dagmar Hugk, Christiane Peschek, Paola Pinna, Fabien Prioville, Prisesalz Crew, RaumZeitPiraten, Eugen Schramm, Catherine Spet, Vesela Stanoeva, Noriyuki Suzuki, Charlotte Triebus, MireviLab