“The island must be a paradise.”
Prince Wilhelm of Nassau, 1842

With these words, Prince Wilhelm of Nassau described the Potsdam Havel landscape in 1842. To this day, Villa Schöningen is situated within an environment that was itself conceived as an ideal: the gardens along the Havel, designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer, form part of the so-called “Prussian Arcadia” — a landscape in which nature was ordered, staged, and transformed into the image of a harmonious life.

Yet paradise is not only a place of longing; it is always also a reflection of its time. Even today, the idea of paradise confronts us in advertising, film, literature, tourism, and digital utopias. On Paradise asks where this imagination has led us — historically and in the present day.

The exhibition understands paradise not as a real place, but as a powerful concept that shapes landscapes, bodies, and social structures. Interior spaces and garden are closely intertwined. What appears inside the house as motif or narrative continues outside as a spatial experience. At its core lies less an origin than a loss. Within visual traditions, paradise often appears as the memory of a condition that has already disappeared. Yet this longing is not without consequences. Landscapes are designed, bodies are regulated, and nature is transformed into image.

For centuries, the female body in particular was projected as a paradisiacal space: available, idealized, and controlled. Contemporary works disrupt this order, shifting paradise from a site of harmony to a space of social negotiation. Figures such as Lilith undermine the idea of a peaceful beginning and transform paradise into a contact zone in which power, knowledge, and gender relations are contested.

At the same time, the idea of paradise persists in images of idyllic landscapes — often standing in contrast to the ecological, political, and colonial realities upon which they are built. Especially in Potsdam, a place shaped by changing political systems and experiences of division, it becomes evident how closely visions of paradise are tied to social utopias. Both socialist futures and Western promises of consumer freedom produced their own images of a “better life.”

Today, paradise is shifting once again. In the visual worlds of Silicon Valley and the development of artificial intelligence, it increasingly appears as an optimized condition: efficient, personalized, and seemingly free of friction. Control does not disappear; rather, it relocates into digital systems, data flows, and algorithmic structures. The exhibition unfolds as a network of historical and contemporary positions. Motifs shift, overlap, and enter into new relationships. Paradise thus emerges not as a lost place, but as an idea that continues to shape our reality today.

Dr. Anne Daffertshofer and Pola van den Hövel