HAPPILAND, a country not far from utopia

About

How will we live? How did we once want to live? Was happened to the plans we made, dreamed up or dimensioned to build a future of our societies? How many of these ideas became some form of reality? How many hopes and plans were thwarted or betrayed? Und what concept can the future offer for the here and now?
Oscillating between utopia and dystopia, between past and future, this exhibition deals with buildings, structures and spaces some of which conjur up big dreams while others explore the banality of the everyday.

While Anna Fiegen is interested in the architectural hopes for a new society in the post-war years in West Germany Irma Markulin’s works focus on the past in the shape of collective memorial sites in her native Bosnia and Herzegowina. A failed utopia can also be discovered in Friederike von Rauch’s photograph Berlin 5, an idea that betrayed itself when it became reality, this aberration itself now having been turned into a museum.

In her series Trashed Utopia Jenny Michel weaves together remnants of various utopias and creates structures resembling city planning maps. Diego Sologuren, on the other hand, is an architect constantly in search of something by crossing the boundaries between the disciplines of art and architecture, discovering possibilities and impossibilities along the way.

Just like Matthias Stuchtey’s Schmarotzer (parasites) leaves the ground below in the form of a very efficient space-saving modular stack construction Christine Niehoff explores architecture in great altitudes. Her interest in space goes right back to utopian ideas of a new society, a new start for mankind. And how do we want to live there?

Featuring:

Anna Fiegen, Irma Markulin, Jenny Michel, Christine Niehoff, Friederike von Rauch, Diego Sologuren, Matthias Stuchtey