The pictorialism suspends the scenes from their narrative potential, and transforms beauty into a hovering uncertainty. In The Green (2002), Killian presents another non-place, the golf course as a familiar background of holiday dramas. Fata Morgana (2007) shows an unusually quiet view of the Thousand and One Nights Palace in the Dutch amusement park Efteling. In a similar disrupting vein Arnout Killian (NL) paints artificial, paradisiacal landscapes with no protagonist, where holiday locations turn into a hyper-real world. The Sunset series (2004) is comprised of nine enlarged postcards of sunsets, multiplying such a perfect romantic moment and disrupting its uniqueness. Their magnitude and smooth surfaces amplify a sense of unboundedness whereas, on the other hand, they evoke the kind of social realism that we see sometimes associated with nationalism.įound photographs are a common feature in the oeuvre of Hans-Peter Feldmann (D). These inviting images of ripe peaches and of an innocent hand reaching for a flower are devoid of the political message usually conveyed by propaganda. He commissioned a professional painter to produce photo-realistic paintings, based on photographs he had taken on the island. By borrowing from the stock of propaganda images in Cyprus, in his Elysian and Flower Paintings series Mustafa Hulusi (UK/CY) questions the trustworthiness of visual representation. The process of multiplication of mediated travel activities defines the somewhat naive anticipation of the tourist on experience and imagination. Supported by: Institut Français des Pays-bas and in partnership with Maison Descartes. The promises of these idealistic and seductive images are appropriated and eventually shifted in the works presented in the exhibition, to reveal other realities, and take us beyond paradise in order to question one of the greatest fictions of our times: that of tourism.Ĭurated by: Delphine Bedel and Ayako Yoshimura, in collaboration with Jelle Bouwhuis. ‘Beyond Paradise’ investigates modes of representation and visibility, starting from the mass production of images – a scheme central to the leisure industry – and the idealized imagery of places, and moves away from the familiar Tourist Gaze to construct unexpected fictional or personal narratives. But it is also significant for the strength of our tourism-minded culture that even such threatening notions and experiences can be integrated in a package tour. The starting point of this exhibition also stems from the paradox that tourism still involves romantic, if not paradisiacal imagery, whereas the tourist experience is actually shattered by all kinds of forces that haunt our daily lives: commercialism, gentrification, the complex entanglement of migration and tourist destinations, war, and fear of terrorism. They reflect on the construction of expectations, experiences and the social imaginary of places evoked by the ubiquitous and pervasive culture of tourism we are living in nowadays. In the exhibition ‘Beyond Paradise’ tourist image production and narratives, as we know them from travel brochures, postcards, advertisements, films and so on, are appropriated in the works presented. Bik Van der Pol, Patricia Esquivias, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Mustafa Hulusi, Arnout Killian, Matthieu Laurette, Sascha Pohle, Lisl Ponger, Erkan Özgen & Sener Özmen.
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