PARADISE @ THE HALL
with Ama Adoley Newman, Ines Doujak, Floriama Cândea, Shinpei Kusanagi, Paul Spendier, Michael Strasser and Dorottya Vékony
"Every park dreams of paradise,” wrote the film maker Derek Jarman. Paradise – whether as a place of longing, a promise, or a lost ideal – is an idea that persists, having inscribed itself deep into both the collective and personal imagination. A word that resonates with comfort and security. With calm, nature, completeness, love and happiness. And yet it remains fleeting, a phantom. What remains when paradise fails as an idea?
The exhibition creates an image of the garden as an ambiguous landscape that is at once traversed and imagined. Cracks, fractures and gaps are revealed behind the apparent harmony.What initially appears orderly loses its stability and seems fake. The term paradise goes back to the Persian pairidaēza – an “enclosed place”. In other words: a garden, a sheltered space. But also a place of confinement.
Floriama Cândea‘s The Invisible Garden shows paradise as an empty husk: lying in a glass pipe is the transparent structure of a plant, the silent remains of what was once alive. Ines Doujak takes up the figure of the divine messenger and trickster Eshu from the Yoruba mythology, who is holding a bunch of hallucinogenic flowers. Kerstin von Gabain’s rotten apple transforms the alluring paradise motif into a sign of decay and delusion. Shinpei Kusanagi’s drawings translate impressions of nature from around the Prater Studios into hallucinatory compositions. Claudia Märzendorfer documents the paradisical garden as a micro ecological space where collected insects are the silent witnesses of a dynamic ecosystem. Carlos Monleón shows a film in which abstracted sturgeons perform as a choir and tell us about their environment in the Danube. Ama Adoley Newman shows replicas of leaves from the four plane trees planted for the World’s Fair of 1873; conserved between sheets of acryl glass, they fluorescently hover in space. Paul Spendier’s Cherry Tree, an artificial, decomposable construction, and The Alive Show, featuring a mechanical puppet, are embodiments of paradise, revealing it to be delicately balanced between nostalgia and the failure of modern utopias. Michael Strasser shows porcelain cockatoos he has broken into pieces, which reassembled highlight the fragility and loss of idealised nature. In Extended Blooming Dorottya Vékony constructs a speculative future in which plants are changed genetically to make them especially attractive for pollinators.
The artists approach paradise in memories, landscapes, bodies and contradictions. Not to capture it, but to disclose its construct and our desire for what it promises.
Curated by Barbara Horvath
The exhibition displays works by current residency artists with austria based artists.
Exhibition duration: 06.09. - 28.09.2025
Exhibition Opening: Saturday, September 6, 2025, 6-9 pm @ The Hall
Opening hours: Thu - Sat: 3-6 pm and by appointment: welcome@partresidency.at
Curator’s Tours: 20.09.2025, 5 pm and 26.09.2025, 5 pm
In grateful recognition of our sponsors and partners:
Ottakringer Brauerei, Vöslauer Mineralwasser, Das Weiße Haus
