hARTware projekte Dortmund presents:

–> Finishing 4th October

Zones of Desire

http://www.ruhr-online.de/reservate

An introduction

Zones of Desire are sites that stage what is considered to be long lost:
worlds of artificial experience, perfect machines of illusion, but also
the private retreats of the individual. Today sees the ubiquitous
creation of infrastructures that make life more acceptable–the
artificial adventure playgrounds of fun parks, the shopping malls of new
consumer culture, zoological gardens as oases of nature, travelling to
exotic worlds, but also catastrophes processed by a TV culture that
ensures that the sublime shudder is experienced from a safe distance.

The exhibition Zones of Desire confronts these scenarios and deals with
artistic approaches to the topographies of staged desire, somewhere
between Easy Living and failed utopias. Derelict for four years, the
Union-Brewery in the center of Dortmund is an ideal non-site for the
project. On four floors with more than 4,000 m2 of industrial ruin, 35
international artists present video works, installations and
photographs, dealing with the spaces and projections of the
post-industrial era. The starting point of the exhibition was one of the
desolate floors in the former brewery building. In its original state,
the floor presented a panorama of ruins turned into an interior space.
Amidst the debris of this inverted landscape, a green lawn was installed
as central motive for the modern reservation.

Visitors enter the exhibition through the specially designed Caf