The dream of the good life is as old as its flip side, the unfulfilled reality with all its alienated relationships between man and man, man and nature. Utopias were designed, paradises were sought in exotic cultures, and machines were constructed to make life easier, better, and more fulfilling – but the basic conflict between desire and reality, appearance, illusion, and disillusionment remained, all the more so in modern societies with their individual biographies of choice and risk. The industries of mass media entertainment, tourism and advertising draw their themes from this. They respond to collective desires for regression (the myth of the original life) or technical progression, stimulating experiences, participation and personal significance with popular formats such as amusement parks, wellness oases, event museums, event and talk shows, daily soaps, etc. All of these offerings have a stereotype that unites them all. All these offerings are united by their stereotypical, artificial character and their surrogate function. In her photographic series, the artist Caroline Hake, born in Wiesbaden in 1968, shows the thoroughly rationalized settings of the popular spectacles, observes in the perfectly illuminated staging the fast-superficial manner of making, the backdrop in the midst of the beautiful appearance. Caroline Hake trusts the emotional and associative effect of her images, which embody the ambivalent effect of the respective situation in a factual-documentary manner, but at the same time finely balanced compositionally and in terms of color.
Prof. Dr. Kai- Uwe Schierz, Kunsthalle Erfurt
Introduction to the exhibition SOLL UND HABEN at the Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2007
