Exit ParadiseThe Miettinen Collection in Sacrow

To mark the 650th anniversary of Sacrow, the Ars Sacrow e.V. association is presenting works from Timo Miettinen's internationally renowned collection as part of its annual ‘Museum for a Summer’ event. This year, Sacrow House, together with Berlin, Düsseldorf and Helsinki, will be one of four exhibition venues for the Miettinen Collection, which comprises around 2,000 works of modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition title ‘Exit Paradise’ refers to the biblical expulsion from paradise, through which man became aware of his physicality and at the same time lost his natural embedding in nature. The works selected for Sacrow show the development of body representations and stagings in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries at twelve themed stations: since antiquity, the idealised body has dominated religious and secular representations. It was not until the artistic avant-gardes that it became a venue for aesthetic and political debates, an artistic medium and material for action art, body art and performances. In the present, the fragmented, manipulated or injured body appears as an image of the individual, his time and its crises.

‘Exit Paradise’ conveys the changing understanding of corporeality, its representations and rituals against the backdrop of a lost natural context. Identity discourses, somatic narratives and a progressive ‘profilicity’ in social media lead to new role models and body concepts, group affiliations and gender attributions, which are taken up and interpreted by the artists in the exhibition in a variety of ways.

Parallel to the exhibition ‘Exit Paradise’ at Sacrow House, further parts of the Miettinen Collection can be seen at the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf from 29 June to 27 September 2025.