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

Paradise: an enduring object of longing, and at the same time a mirror of our own moment. The idea of paradise permeates advertising, literature, film, television, and art. Yet what accounts for its continued fascination? At the center of the exhibition is an exploration of some among the many paths along which the idea of paradise has taken shape thus far. Not just as an abstract notion, but as a material inquiry, traced through landscapes, images, bodies, and social structures. Villa Schöningen itself is located within a deliberately designed environment. The gardens along the Havel, shaped by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer, form part of a Prussian Arcadia in which nature was carefully constructed. Landscape appears here as both ideal and promise.

On Paradise begins precisely at this intersection. The exhibition approaches paradise not as a place, but as a potent projection that shapes images, bodies, and territories. Interior and exterior are closely intertwined. What emerges within the house as motif, material, or narrative finds its echo in the garden as spatial experience. Rather than pursuing an ideal of perfection, the exhibition attends to the fractures, shifts, and contradictions that surface in the process of deconstructing paradise.

At its outset lies not only origin, but also loss. Within visual traditions, paradise seldom appears as a present reality, but rather as a memory or projection of a state beyond one’s own time. Yet this idea is far from inconsequential. It has shaped landscapes, translated nature into images, and rendered those images as ideals. What seems harmonious often reveals itself as the product of control: through selection, design, and exclusion.

This logic equally informs depictions of the body. Across centuries, the female body in particular has been cast as a paradisiacal terrain—a fertile, available surface and projection of desire. Contemporary practices unsettle this order by fragmenting, materializing, or situating the body within ecological and social contexts. Here, paradise shifts from an idealized promise to a site of negotiation. The story of Adam and Eve may also be read less as an origin than as a structure of conflict. Figures such as Lilith disrupt the notion of a harmonious beginning, rendering paradise a contact zone where power, knowledge, and gender relations are continually contested.

At the same time, the idea of paradise endures in images of idyllic landscapes: tropical scenes, northern vistas, or idealized suburban scenes in film and media.  Such images often arise in contrast to one’s own environment and depend on omitting realities that would disrupt their idyllic illusion. Historically, this longing has been closely tied to colonial projections, through which landscapes, ecologies, and social structures were violently reorganized, economically exploited, and destabilized over time.

The exhibition reveals a network of relationships between historical and contemporary perspectives. Motifs shift, overlap, and form new constellations. Paradise appears not as a lost place, but as an idea which continues to shape reality in the present.Dr Anne Daffertshofer, Pola van den Hövel