An orphaned drugstore with empty shelves. Heart-shaped balloons that glide through the exhibition. A room filled with wardrobes from which children’s songs can be heard. The exhibition FANTASY ISLAND brings together works that unsettle and captivate in equal measure. Through subtle distortions, familiar scenes and objects from everyday life take on a surreal, sometimes uncanny character. The collective of female artists entitled FORT (Alberta Niemann, *1982 in Bremen, and Jenny Kropp, *1978 in Frankfurt/Main; both live in Berlin) connects art and life in a special way.

The exhibition featuring master-class students from the Hochschule der Künste Bremen offers multifaceted insights into the quality and variety of current artistic production in the Hanseatic city. The exhibition covers more than 800 m2 on the fourth floor of the Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst and, without a single exception, presents new works. There is an extensive variety of themes finding expression in highly diverse media.

In her films, photographs and performances, Julika Rudelius (*1968 in Cologne, lives in Amsterdam) is moved by curiosity to investigate people, stereotypes and milieus that she does not (yet) know and that in most cases are quite different from what she would have thought before. The desire to plunge into these realities and to seek out their contradictions, aesthetics and functional modes marks her artistic output on both the contentual and formal levels.

Coldness encompasses both low external temperatures or emotional detachment, lack of empathy, and the absence of solidarity. Coldness can also become an artistic medium, used to portray and critique societal conditions. The international group exhibition Cold as Ice. Coldness in Art and Society explores the existential dimension of coldness.

The exhibition presents the multimedia oeuvre of the artists’ collective Die Tödliche Doris. It is the first comprehensive survey show dedicated to the group, which was active from 1980–1987. Die Tödliche Doris arose to equal degree in the surroundings of the punk movement and amid the art academy in West Berlin. Structured as an artists’ collective, it worked conceptually with various media in the areas of music, performance, video, painting, object art and literature. In particular, it repeatedly put to question our habits of seeing and hearing.