The exhibition “Phantom of the Paradise” examines the contemporary condition in which the human beings increasingly experience themselves as a project that must be constantly developed, improved, and reshaped. Power no longer manifests primarily through direct coercion or prohibition, but rather through promises of a better life, self-development, and autonomy, reinforcing the idea that success, worth, and failure lie entirely in one’s own hands. Cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han has described how, within such a framework, the individual becomes both manager and disciplinarian of the self, for whom control begins to appear as freedom.

The body, emotions, desire, attention, social relationships, and even sleep become things that must be constantly managed, optimized, and corrected. Ambivalence, grief, loss, confusion, stagnation, or vulnerability are treated as conditions that need to be fixed, processed, or overcome. Self-help and wellness culture increasingly render emotional life governable: relationships require interpretation, suffering demands justification, and a person’s value appears dependent on their ability to adapt, recover, and perform.

Morality, productivity, and control no longer concern only labor or production, but also intimacy, the body, and the most ordinary rituals and activities of everyday life. What appears natural or desirable often reveals itself as a socially produced norm through which bodies, habits, and relationships to the self are shaped.

The same logic also emerges within the manosphere, where control, discipline, and self-management become central values of masculine identity. Both wellness culture and the manosphere share an aversion toward vulnerability, dependency, and incompleteness, favoring instead the disciplined, constantly evolving, self-regulating individual. Desire itself may prove deceptive here: seducing through fantasies of purity, balance, control, and redemption, it becomes suffocating or dangerous upon closer encounter.

Within late-capitalist culture, even rest, reading, or idleness are subordinated to the logic of productivity, self-improvement, and recovery. The value of activity becomes tied to measurable outcomes, efficiency, and self-optimization. Alongside this, the exhibition also proposes another kind of temporality: slow, repetitive, and unfinished forms of making that do not strive toward measurable results or self-transcendence.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from an essay by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, in which he refers to Brian De Palma's film The Phantom of Paradise, and deals with the imaginations of a better, healthier and more holistic life that always remains inaccessible to a person living under the neoliberal order.