Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY

In the organizer's words:

silent green presents

"We are currently living in an ongoing crisis mode. After a pandemic, there are currently wars with a considerable potential for escalation and we know that the tipping points of the climate catastrophe have long since been passed. It's actually clear: the game is up." - _{^{Bjørn Melhus}}

July 17 to August 23, 2026 I Concrete Hall
Opening: Thu, July 16, Admission: 7 pm / Start: 7:30 pm
Opening hours: Tue-Fri, 2pm-8pm / Sat-Sun, 11am-8pm
Free admission

This summer, silent green is dedicating an extensive solo exhibition to the artist Bjørn Melhus. LOST IN FINITY unfolds as an immersive installation that has been specially designed for silent green's concrete hall.

Melhus stages the exhibition space as a course through the media-based, collective subconscious of the 20th and 21st centuries, as a cinematic narrative between human desires and fears, between doomsday scenarios and utopian designs. The starting point is material with newly combined excerpts from his artistic work of the past 35 years, which resonates with the present in an uncanny way: religious imagery meets pop-cultural visions of the end times and technoid exit strategies.

LOST IN FINITY creates an equally melancholic and tragic-comic space for thinking about the multi-crisis of the present, combined with the acute question of possible counter-designs and new utopias.

The end of time in infinity

While apocalypticism is currently back in vogue, we are experiencing the denial of the possibility of an end in a "just-go-on-so". Two states that the philosopher Srečko Horvat describes in his book Poetry from the Future as "apocalyptic fetishism" and "fetishist denial". The exhibition attempts to intertwine both issues.

Central to the thematic focus of the exhibition is the video work REVELATION, which was created in 2024 during a residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome and is now being shown in Berlin for the first time. It takes up motifs from the Book of Revelation and interweaves them in an almost suggestive and painterly way with pictorial ciphers of the present.

"For several years now, I have been investigating apocalyptic narratives in my work as
recurring motifs within entertainment cinema and pop culture. During my stay in Rome, I turned my attention not only to ancient history but also to the apocalyptic imagery to be discovered here, in order to attempt to create a phantasmorgasmic moving image with REVELATION , which links the ecstatic-religious and sometimes almost psychedelic ideas with contemporary threats."

- Bjørn Melhus
From a conversation with Dr. Susanne Kaufmann-Valet, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

LOST IN FINITY is woven into an overarching, dream-like narrative of short video loops: A constantly changing composition of figures, monologue and dialog fragments, sound fragments, landscapes, planets and space projections guides visitors through the exhibition. At the same time, the exhibition space becomes a journey through the core questions of an artistic practice that has been dealing with media representations of war, religion, capitalism and lost utopias for three decades. Melhus' own voice is never heard, instead he works with varying, repetitive voice quotations that he extracts from well-known Hollywood films, TV series and YouTube videos.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive program of screenings and talks.

Bjørn Melhus

Bjørn Melhus first showed a film at a Berlin short film festival in 1986 and has lived in Berlin since 1987. His award-winning and internationally exhibited videos and installations deal critically and humorously with mass media and social phenomena in specially developed narratives and role-playing games.

Melhus studied art at the HBK Braunschweig in the 1990s and film at the California Institute of the Arts as a DAAD scholarship holder. In addition to shorter stays abroad, including in Japan, Mexico, Hungary and Italy, he was a fellow of the State of Lower Saxony at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Within video art, Bjørn Melhus has developed a singular position that primarily expands the possibilities of cinema and television reception. His stories have narrative structures that are shaped by the fragmentation of image and sound. By fragmenting, destroying and reconstituting familiar motifs, themes and strategies of the mass media, he not only creates a network of new meanings and critical commentaries, but also redefines the viewer's relationship to them. His rhythmized language and sound collages almost casually incorporate the means of video clip and trailer culture, but Melhus neither quotes pop music nor propagates lifestyle in an appropriative form. His works expose mechanisms of commercialization and rebel against simplification and global cultural standardization.

Bjørn Melhus lives and works in Berlin and teaches at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. In 2023/24 he was a fellow at the German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo.

The solo exhibition LOST IN FINITY is a project of silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH. Supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.