2011
porcelain
30 x 22 x 17 cm
edition of 10

2010
permanent sculpture for the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, Berlin/DE
14 x 7 x 2,5 m

2008/2011
Lighted display case (satin stainless steel frame, neon)
142 x 192 x 3,5 cm
Edition of 3
Large slide of the original baroque chart Accurata Utopia Tabula (prob. J. B. Homann, ca. 1716 after a narration by A. Schnebelin ca. 1694), with an additional complete index of all toponymy.

Mount Lascivious, Usuryville, Jobbery, Fingerinthroat, Changeling, Snoothacking, Slovenly Morass, the Department of Salaciousness, the Department of Excreting Specie, Pickpocketing, Mount of Venus, Titty River. ...
Rivers of wine and beer, streets of ginger and nutmeg, an ideally formed terrain and fertile groundcover, valuable buildings, and businesses where one neither buys nor sells. There is neither cripple, nor blind man, neither a crosseye nor a mute, neither scabies nor acne nor loathsome monstrosity, but everyone is perfectly beautiful in every limb. And the strength of the men in their lust for the female sex never fails. Women are delivered of children while dancing and making music, and as soon as the children are born, they speak, eat, run, and do everything all by themselves. And when women have had children, they never have limp, hanging breasts, wrinkles and folds, or anything of the like. They cannot be distinguished from virgins. All parts of their bodies are exactly like those of virgins.

This utopian country forms an entire portion of the world, consisting of 17 provinces and several groups of islands, with almost 2000 names of fictional towns, rivers, and lakes, whose imaginative descriptions tell of both satiated wealth and bizarre superfluity, and yet also testify to the constant threat of privation. In the middle of the continent is a country where gold coins lie scattered in the streets, beautiful clothes grow on trees, and nobody works because everything produces itself.
The houses are entirely made of finest gold, although the gold is worth nothing, since it is not possible to buy anything in this domain. And this abundance prevails throughout the country, so that purses full of coins simply lie around on the fields; one can find masses of Arabic and Byzantine gold coins – gratis and of absolutely no use. Nobody buys or sells there. Anyone who works is beaten; things are only bestowed or received. Nature is exaggeratedly fertile and automatically renders up her bounty to humanity.

A circular excavation of 10m diameter and 45° slope, 2m deep, a shiny metal frame on two steel cross-members. Overall height 11m. White and blue flourescent characters running around the frame form the text:
„RIVERS OF WINE + BEER + STREETS OF GINGER + NUTMEG + AN IDEAL TYPE OF TERRAIN + FERTILE GROUND COVER + LUXURIOUS BUILDINGS IN WHICH NO ONE BUYS OR SELLS + NOR IS THERE A CRIPPLE OR A BLIND MAN OR A CROSS-EYED MAN OR A MUTE OR A SCABIES OR ACNE SUFFERER OR A DEFORMED PERSON THERE + EVERYONE IS TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL IN ALL TREIR LIMBS + THE STRENGTH OF MEN TO SLEEP WITH THEIR WOMEN NEVER EBBS +„

Realized as part of "show me the way to public sphere!", Wiesbadener Kunstsommer 2006

Steel cross-members, a metal frame, an excavation, already half overgrown. During the day, Thorsten Goldberg‘s work looks like an unfinished building site, a bad architectural investment in the no-man‘s land behind the station that no one has taken the trouble to remove. Only at night, when all functional, efficiency-oriented life comes to a standstill and the landscape of the transit area, euphemistically called a „Culture Park“, between the empty car park and the sense-numbing partying of the Schlachthof succumbs to the darkness as if half-asleep, does the message ofthe white neon letters emerge, picked out like an apparition against the dark night sky.

The text running round the metal frame can only be read by twisting your neck not inconsiderably. A promise of that special world that has inspired the imagination of men and women for centuries as an antagonism to the heavenly Jerusalem. Thorsten Goldberg promises nothing less than the creation of a land of milk and honey, a utopia of unfettered freedom in which children come into the world as adults and women remain virginal for ever.

This vision of this land of absolute freedom, paired with uninhibited gluttony and sexual permissiveness, is a human dream which can be followed back in this form into the Middle Ages and further still. At the end ofthe 17th century, the Imperial General Johann Andreas Schnebelin set out to present the nature of the imaginary Luilekkerland (Cockaigne) in a book „in which all the vices of the waggish world, in particular kingdoms, estates and areas with many silly towns and cities (...) and many notions worth reading were described very clearly“* in every detail with town names and rivers. On the basis of this text, the „Accurata Utopiae Tabula“, the true map of paradise, appeared at the end of the 17th century. Thorsten Goldberg has worked with this for several years. He takes the basis of his works from the ribaldly titled regions and towns with names such as Schlampenmorast (slut mire), Wollustberg (lust mountain) and Ampt Geilhausen (hornytown council) and the concept of a land of unfulfilled desires.
In the area next to the railway tracks, which is in a state of urban planning flux, the structure announces the creation of the land in which all dreams come true, the streets are paved with gold and the civilisation disease of imperative productivity turns into natural superabundance. No one has to work, worry about paying his rent, count calories or make any other effort. The status quo maintains itself, a huge sensory perpetuum mobile in which idleness replaces progress and, ultimately, domination by physical urges takes the place of reflection.

However, the metal frame is empty. Where the construction sign should be, something material and tangible, there is nothing but the dark sky. lt is less a projection surface than a window that is created in the work. A window, the purpose of which is not what you see through it but the action of looking through it. Via wooden stairs you reach the bottom of the excavation, which is thickly covered with wild grasses and even sunflowers. lt is a strangely perfect excavation with a diameter of exactly 10 metres and a slope of precisely 45 degrees. Down there on the almost romantically chaotic piece of meadow, as if punched out from somewhere else and transplanted here, the familiar environment disappears. The daydreams that are normally forgotten after a sigh and a dreamy look out ofthe window take on a quasi-real, physical presence

Down here, behind the station, is where it is to be built. The utopia emerges from the individual world of ideas and enters the hell of bureaucracy and marketing. Decisions are taken, it is planned, interrupted and finally forgotten. A euphoric construction project, the foundations of which turn out to be meaningless and impossible in the hard light of day. However, given the bright writing, like the enticing hallelujah of a sect on a recruitment drive, it is easy to forget the absence of content.
And all of these theoretical considerations do not do justice to the feeling of standing in front of the unreal sign in the darkness, this mighty, irrational feeling of being so dose. Someone has even started, it only needs to be finished and then you just eat your way through the mountain of rice pudding and all your worries melt away.
Thorsten Goldberg creates a monument to longing. But the bright promise surrounds a void in front of a wild hole in the midst of the familiar lawn. The dream of the land of milk and honey is vain. A dream fed by a demand that, once fulfilled, liberates human beings from themselves and then dismisses them with nothing other than a confused look of complete meaninglessness into their own downfall.

Katharina Klara Jung from Catalog: "Wo bitte geht´s zum Öffentlichen? / Show me the way to public sphere!" Editor: Kulturamt der Stadt Wiesbaden and Martin Henatsch, Büro für Kunst und Öffentlichkeit Münster; Publisher: Kerber Verlag 2007, ISBN 978-3-938025-52-9; Translation into English by Peter Bowen
* Schnebelin, Johann Andreas: „Erklärung der Wunder=seltzamen Land = Charten Utopiae, so da ist/ das neu = entdeckte Schlaraffenland/ Worinnen All und jede Laster der schalckhafftigen Welt/ als besondere Königreiche/ Herrschaften und Gebiete/ mit vielen läppischen Städten/ Festungen/ Flecken und Dorffern/ Flüssen/ Bergen/ Seen/ Insuln/ Meer und Meer = Busen/ wie nicht weniger Dieser Nationen Sitten/ Regiment/ Gewerbe/ samt vielen leßwürdigen Einfällen aufs deutlichste beschrieben; Allen thörrechten Läster = Freunden zum Spott/ denen Tugend liebenden zur Warnung/ und denen melancholischen Gemüthern zu einer ehrlichen Ergetzung vorgestellet. Gedruckt zu Arbeitshausen/ in der Graffschafft Fleissig/ in diesem Jahr da Schlarraffenland entdecket ist“, end of the 17th century.

2005
Installation in the Miro Museum, Espai 13, Barcelona/ES

A dialog: 90 min. video (16:3 format) on 4 synchronized video projectors, projecting onto a low 7 x 1,3 m stage, a large cosmetic cotton wool pad on a saucer, a radio and a Smart-Car (with integrated speakers)

within "Obsessions, (zero % standard)" curated by Montse Badia; narrators: Roger Tebb, Jeffrey Burrell; english translation of all texts: Allison Plath-Moseley; spanish and catalan translation of all texts: Miro Foundation, Barcelona

Created specifically for the Espai 13, Things are generally different behind closed doors is an installation in which two rather strange figures discuss their lives. A pad of cotton-wool (of the sort used for removing make-up) and a Smart car talk about their experiences, their ideals and their personal conflicts. The conversation is in words and also in images that are projected onto a kind of stage. The subjects talked about vary widely: city life as opposed to country life, relations with other people, different lifestyles and their implications, dress and appearances as indicators of belonging to different communities or social groups, the welfare state and its more specific personal implications, reality shows, the awareness and acceptance of belonging to a mediatised society.
All the dialogues are taken from conversations that the artist has overheard in trains, restaurants and other public places. So the two figures are certainly not exotic but merely two specimens of the present day. One of them is more homely and balanced, modest and disciplined, realistic and practical, and more or less satisfied with its situation in life. The other is more complex, unstable, over-the-top, sociable and with a tendency to make quick value judgements. (...)"
Montse Badia, Espai 13, 2005-06 season on www.bcn.fjmiro.es

The cotton wool pad speaks through a small radio apparatus, the Smart-car speaks through it´s car-speakers. The video is projected by 4 synchronized led-projectors onto a low stage that streches betweeen the two. The film shown provides the scene in which the conversation takes place: a train´s restaurant. The camera slowly and permanenty rotates - the view out of the windows shows the scenery pass by - countryside, train stations, towns, as well as assembled sequences, that annotate the spoken words - dolly shot through a shopping mall, people in the street, a brassband, a pan shot through an amusement park, house fronts ...
Thorsten Goldberg, 2005

Red curtain, guide-rail, electrical drive, control system
curtain ca. 5m x 2,75m, rail system 60m

Permanent installation in the Martin-Gropius-Building, State Clinic Eberswalde, commissioned by the Landesbauamt Bernau and the Ministerium der Finanzen Brandenburg, 2002

Very slowly - at the level of percetion - a red curtain, made of fine and smooth fabric, moves within twelf hours from one end of the glass walkway, through the park to the other end. Realized 2002 in the Martin-Gropius-Building of the State Clinic Eberswalde, commissioned by the Landesbauamt Bernau and the Ministerium der Finanzen Brandenburg.

A 60 meters long glass walkway, set on poles, connects the main building of the clinic with the economy building and leads 3 meters above the ground through the park and the herb garden. As the walls are entirely made of glass, the walkway offers open view of the surrounding park scenery. The appoximatly 1 minute passage through this corridor offers a totally different experience, as for instance ones way through a pedestrian underpass. Walking on a second level through the landscape is comparable with ones walk on a mole or a landing stage.

The red curtain is attached to a guide rail of the same lenght of the walkway, which in turn is affixed to the ceiling. Pulled by a wire cable, the curtain moves at 1,4 mm/sec within 12 hours from one end of the tube to the other end, where it returns and travels back at the same slow speed. About 720 times slower than one´s passage through the walkway, the movement of the curtain is still noticeable. The slow trip of the red curtain inside the glass corridor and through the park is visible from afar and offers orientation in time and a landmark in the complex of the clinic.

The curtain is made of fine and smooth fabric by english tradition of interior decoration, hardly flamable and doubble coated and lined, to form a nice and even drapery. It is ca. 500 cm wide and ca. 275 cm high and thus takes a thirteens of the lenght of the entire walkway.

Five large screens, fit in between the pillars of the atrium of the State Clinic Eberswalde, show hands walking on their tips.

Realized 2002 in the Martin-Gropius-Building of the State Clinic Eberswalde, commissioned by the Landesbauamt Bernau and the Ministerium der Finanzen Brandenburg.

Gasflame, burner nozzle, gas line
Chimney ca. 50m, horizontal flame ca. 1m

Temporary installation 2000 - 2001

At an altitude of thirty meters, an approximately one-meter-long gas flame projects horizontally from the side of a chimney belonging to a disused coke-manufacturing plant. Realized as part of „Auf zu den Sternen“ (off to the stars), presented by the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, September 2000 to March 2001, in the Schiffbauergasse industrial zone, Potsdam.

1997
Neon objects built into metal-framed, flat acrylic glass vessels
1 meter in diameter and 20 centimetres deep
Permanent Installation, Oberbaum Bridge Berlin

Rock-Paper-Scissors - random generated neon signs permanently marking the former urban frontier crossing point Oberbaum-Bridge in Berlin. Completed in December 1997 in award of the Senate for Construction, Living and Traffic of Berlin.

Set into the triangular shapes created by the steel girders of the newly constructed overhead railway bridge by S. Calatrava, one neon sculpture was placed above each side of the shipping channel. Each of these two objects consists of three hand positions shown in outline by neon tubes of a different colour. With the aid of a random generator the outlines change in position and colour every six seconds.

Similar to a subway clock, they are attached via a pole to steel beam soffets. Instead of the usual fluorescent tubes, transparent glass was used, which makes the colored radiating gas column visible.creating an unsettling, and „livelier“ effect, They operate from dusk until 1am. These signs of similar size and colour but different form, also serving as reminders of the divisions between the facing parts of the town, were added to the coats of arms of Märkish towns Their design functions like a road sign, in a matter-of- fact way. They are not intended to be a conspicuous sign pointing the way, but to integrate fully with the historical bridge, as well as with its new mid-section.

The Rock-Paper-Scissors is international. By chosing this game, I do not mean to detract from or trivialise its significance, such as the arbitrary way in which the decision to let someone pass the frontier or not is taken. Its very simplicity or playfulness does not mean that it is irrelevant. The fact that it uses simple symbols makes it universally comprehensible: two individuals face each other and try to come to a decision which engenders neither argumentation nor violence.

The fact that the „official“ partition ran along the Kreuzberg river bank and not directly through the middle of the bridge has nothing to do with personal perception. „Over there“ is always the other side, the other bank - Otherness.