Happiness

Short & sweet

From a small concrete building placed in public space, the installation Happiness explores the world of artificial happiness, which is increasingly available to us in the form of drugs, painkillers, and anti-depressants.

Still curious?

The small concrete building looks like a mix between a public toilet and a pharmacy. A small illegal shop staffed by a humanoid robot. She talks to us about different drugs, painkillers, and anti-depressants we can use to adjust our emotional reality by changing the serotonin and dopamine levels in our brain. With the combination of robots and fabrics, the installation explores the zone where human and the artificial merge; where, aided by synthetic drugs, we can rehumanize or become more than human. Or escape our human condition altogether for a while.

Happiness is created by the renowned Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven, who is one of the most debated artists of our time. Provocative and thought-provoking, he mixes theatre, scenography, and visual art, and creates installations, performances and happenings in museums, theaters and in public spaces. In the borderland between performance and installation art, he highlights various aspects of the common social reality in which we live.