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Exhibitions
- Björn Dahlem
Betaflor (club silencio)
08/02/2002 - 06/04/2002
Björn Dahlem, born in 1974 in Munich, has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, with Hubert Kiecol. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
His installations usually fill entire spaces and refer to physics phenomena and scientific models. The sources of inspiration for his playful constructions of lively parallel worlds come from science fiction, philosophy, psychology, alchemy, and the theories of relativity and quantum.
One cannot speak of high-tech or enthusiastic progressivism. Although his sculptures circulate around electromagnetic fields, stellar figurations, and spatial constructions, the materials, mostly found in landfills, go against the viewer’s expectations.
Instead of a hygienic laboratory environment and shiny chrome, we find ourselves in a provisional situation, in an attempted construction that already includes the failures of the experiment.
For Dahlem, this starting point is specific to his generation. The end of the great utopias that marked the last century has left its mark on young artists. It has done away with faith in an objective view of the world. We are faced with the fear of nothing.
Dahlem transfers the model from science to the sphere of art, but he does not see himself as an artist who enters science. Rather, he interprets these models as substitutes for fundamental questions: Where do I come from? Who am I?, to subversively dilute them with the simplest means, with a lot of irony and exactness.
Dahlem marks insecurities, recognitions, systems and utopias. His associations play with the poetic potential of the literal determination of scientific terminology and he creates terms of his own. As an admirer of characters as different as Tatlin, Stanislav Lem or Kippenberger, he combines the appearance of theoretical constructions with the subversive gesture of the absurd.