“Every park dreams of paradise,” wrote the filmmaker Derek Jarman. The paradise – as a place of longing, promise or lost ideal – is a stubborn picture that has entered deeply in collective and personal ideas. A word that sounds like security. After rest, nature, perfection, love and happiness. And yet it remains fleeting, a phantom. What remains if paradise fails as an idea?
The exhibition designs a picture of the garden as a ambiguous structure that is crossed and imagined at the same time. The apparent harmony reveals cracks, fractures and empty spaces. What initially appears in an orderly loses its stability and works incorrectly. The term paradise goes back to the Persian pairidaese – A “staggered place”. So a garden, a shelter. But also a place of delimitation.
Floriama Cândeas The Invisible Garden Shows paradise as an empty shell: in a long glass tube, the transparent scaffolding of a plant is a quiet rest of what was once alive. Ines Doujak the figure of the divine messenger and tricksters ESHU from the Yoruba mythology that carries a bouquet of hallucinogenic plants. Kerstin von Gabains rotten apple transforms the tempting paradise motif into a sign of decay and deception. Shinpei KusanagiS Drawings translate impressions of nature around the Praterateliers into hallucinatory compositions. Claudia Märzendorfer Documented the paradisiacal garden as a microecological area, in which collected insects are visible as a silent witnesses of a dynamic ecosystem. Carlos Monleón Shows a film in which abstracted disruption appear as a choir and tell of their environment in the Danube. Ama Adoviy Newman Shows leaf formation of the four planes planted for the 1983 world exhibition, preserved between acrylic glass plates and fluorescent in the room. In Paul Spendiers artificially dismantled Cherry tree and the mechanical doll The Alive Show The paradise appears as a fragile staging between nostalgia and the failure of modern utopias. Michael Strasser Shows from him broken porcelain cacadus, which in their new composition make the fragility and loss of idealized nature visible. In Extended Blooming designed Dorottya thin A speculative future in which plants are genetically modified in such a way that they attract pollinators particularly strongly.
The artists: Inside, paradise approaches in memories, landscapes, bodies and contradictions. Not to capture it, but to make his construct and the desire visible afterwards.
Curated by Barbara Horvath
The exhibition shows works of current residency artists: Inside in dialogue with local artists: inside.
Exhibition period: 07.-28.09.2025, DO-SA 15-18h and on request
Part is a program of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Living, Art, Culture, Media and Sport.
Artist Talk
Floriama Cândea, Carlos Monleón, Paul Spendier in conversation with curator Barbara Horvath
Datum: 06.09.2025, 4:00 p.m.
Ort: The HALL. PART International Art Residency Austria
Meiierestrasse 3
1020 Wien
URL: https://www.partresidency.at
opening
Olga Okunev, Head of Department IV/A/6 – Fine art, design, fashion, photography and media art, speak at the opening of the Federal Ministry of Living, Art, Culture, Media and Sports Alexandra Grausam, Director Part International Art Residency Austria Barbara Horvath, curator Part International Art Residency Austria
Datum: 06.09.2025, 5:00 p.m.
Ort: The HALL. PART International Art Residency Austria
Meiierestrasse 3
1020 Wien
URL: https://www.partresidency.at
Curator
Datum: 20.09.2025, 5:00 p.m.
Ort: The HALL. PART International Art Residency Austria
Meiierestrasse 3
1020 Wien
Austria
URL: https://www.partresidency.at
Curator
Datum: 09/26/2025, 5:00 p.m.
Ort: The HALL. PART International Art Residency Austria
Meiierestrasse 3
1020 Wien
Austria
URL: https://www.partresidency.at