Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY

silent green presents

"We are currently living in an ongoing state of crisis. After a pandemic, we now face wars with significant potential for escalation, and we know that the tipping points of the climate catastrophe have long been crossed. It is actually quite clear: the game is over." _{^{– Bjørn Melhus}}

This summer, silent green dedicates a major solo exhibition to the artist Bjørn Melhus. LOST IN FINITY unfolds as an immersive overall installation conceived specifically for the Betonhalle at silent green.

Melhus stages the exhibition space as a circuit through the medial, collective unconscious of the 20th and 21st centuries, as a cinematic narrative between human desires and fears, between visions of collapse and utopian possibility. The starting point is material featuring newly recombined excerpts from his artistic work of the past 35 years, which resonates with the present in uncanny ways: religious imagery meets pop-cultural end-time visions and technoid exit strategies.

LOST IN FINITY creates a space for reflection that is at once melancholic and tragicomic, responding to today's multicrisis linked to the urgent question of possible counter-narratives and new utopias.

End of Time within Infinity

While apocalyptic thinking is once again ever-present, we simultaneously experience, in a “business as usual” mode, the denial of the very possibility of an end. Two conditions that the philosopher Srečko Horvat describes in his book Poetry from the Future as "apocalyptic fetishism" and "fetishist denial." The exhibition seeks to intertwine both conditions.

Central to the conceptual framework of the exhibition is the video work REVELATION, created in 2024 during a residency at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome and now shown in Berlin for the first time. Drawing on motifs from the Book of Revelation, it interweaves them with contemporary visual codes in a manner that is at once painterly and quietly hypnotic.
 

"For several years now, my work has been examining apocalyptic narratives 
as recurring motifs within entertainment cinema and pop culture.

During my time in Rome, I turned, alongside the city's ancient history, 
to the apocalyptic visual worlds waiting to be discovered. With REVELATION, 
I set out to create a phantasmorgasmic moving image that connects the ecstatic-religious, 
and at times almost psychedelic imaginaries with contemporary threats."

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

LOST IN FINITY is woven into a larger, dreamlike narrative composed of short video loops: a constantly shifting composition of figures, fragments of monologue and dialogue, snatches of sound, landscapes, planets, and projections of outer space that guides visitors through the exhibition. At the same time, the exhibition space becomes a journey through the core concerns of an artistic practice that has spent three decades engaging with media representations of war, religion, capitalism, and lost utopias. Melhus own voice is never heard. Instead, he works with recurring vocal samples extracted from well-known Hollywood films, TV series, and YouTube videos.

Programme

16.7.
Opening Evening
Start with Welcome: 7 pm I Lawn
Opening: 7:30 pm I Betonhalle
 
17.7.–23.8. Solo Exhibition I Betonhalle

17.7.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – THE BEGINNING
Artist Talk | 7 pm | Kuppelhalle
Artist talk on the exhibition with Bjørn Melhus and Vanina Saracino.

19.7.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Artist Talk | 7 pm | Kuppelhalle
Bjørn Melhus introduces the exhibition’s film programme and discusses the broader context of selected works and their respective sources.

24.7.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – MELANCHOLIA
Film Screening | 9:30 pm | Lawn
As part of LOST IN FINITY, we are screening Melancholia (2011), Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic drama in english OV with German subtitles.

7.8.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – THE END
Film Screening | 9:15 pm | Lawn
As part of LOST IN FINITY, we are screening Joshua Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic musical THE END (2024) in english OV with German subtitles.

14.8.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – Open Air Kino THE WIZARD OF OZ
As part of LOST IN FINITY, we are screening The Wizard of Oz (1939) in english OV with German subtitles.

20.8.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Artist-Talk | 7 pm | Kuppelhalle
Across the wide spectrum of fictional apocalypses, viruses, meteorites, comets, wars, the religious rapture, or even the devil himself bring about the end of the world. In an entertaining yet informative evening, Bjørn Melhus presents a selection of these narratives through curated excerpts from apocalyptic films. Some of these works were used as audio source material, while others served as inspiration.

23.8.
Bjørn Melhus: LOST IN FINITY – DEADLY FRUITS – From Earth Rise to Weltuntergang
Lecture, Performance | 7 pm | Kuppelhalle
A lecture performance by Bjørn Melhus, followed by a closing event of the exhibition at Betonhalle.

Bjørn Melhus

Bjørn Melhus first showed a film at a Berlin short film festival in 1986 and has lived in Berlin since 1987. His widely acclaimed and internationally exhibited videos and installations explore in a critical and humourous way the phenomena of mass media and society, through narratives and role plays of his own invention.

In the 1990s Melhus studied art at HBK Braunschweig (University of Fine Arts) and film at the California Institute of the Arts as a recipient of a DAAD scholarship. In addition to shorter residencies in Japan, Mexico, Hungary, and Italy, he was a recipient of a scholarship 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, above all, expands the possibilities of cinematic and television reception. His works feature narrative structures shaped by the fragmentation of both the visual and the audio layers. Through fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of familiar motifs, themes, and strategies drawn from mass media, he creates not only a network of new meanings and critical commentary, but also redefines the viewer's relationship to these same sources. His rhythmically composed language and sound collages almost casually incorporate the elements of video and trailer culture, yet Melhus neither quotes pop music nor promotes lifestyle in any appropriative sense. His works expose the mechanisms of commercialisation, rebel against simplification and global culturual homogenisation. 

Bjørn Melhus lives and works in Berlin and teaches at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. In 2023/24 he was a recipient of a scholarship at the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo.