Happiness (Working Title) - Glück welches Glück
Collaboration between the German Hygiene Museum Dresden and the Siemens Arts Program Munich 6 March - 2 November 2008

Catalogue "Glück – welches Glück"; herausgegeben von Gisela Staupe und Beate Hentschel. Mit Beiträgen von Bruno S. Frey und Alois Stutzer, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Helene Karmasin, Barbara Mittler, Katrin Passig, Birger P. Priddat, Josef H. Reichholf, Gerhard Schulze, Manfred Spitzer, Ruut Veenhoven > www.dhmd.de

fig.: Aphrodite / Venus Kallipygos. Original in Neapel, Museo Archeologico Nazionale Gipsabguss, 1784 aquired with the Collection Anton Raphael Mengs. © Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Foto: Hans-Peter Klut/Elke Estel, Dresden

The motif "Venus with the beautiful back" exists since ancient times. The beauty of the body is the source for happiness. But each time and culture have their own definition which back is beautiful. And even the ranking of what makes us happy changes with times and cultures.

The exhibition Happiness propounds the idea that happiness is a basic anthropological constant of human life, but opposes the reigning dictatorship of happiness and its easily consumed ideologies, which it submits to a critical examination. The exhibition pleads for liberating happiness from the currently dominant, too narrowly hedonistic categories of thought. It regards itself as a laboratory for an expanded concept of happiness and investigates happiness as a synonym for love, freedom, humanity, security, health, faith, ritual, contentedness, nostalgia, homeland, and the absence of anxiety and violence.

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