Björn Dahlem (born in 1974) has developed a site-specific installation for the first large exhibition space at Berlinische Galerie. In the show, the artist has summed up his recent engagement with cosmological themes by designing a spaceship. The spaceship is complemented by various sculptures all created this year, in some cases especially for this exhibition.

Dahlem works with various world images and their impacts on our understanding of reality. He is interested above all in those aspects that can be found beyond the realm of secure knowledge, raising questions rather than providing final answers, thus leaving room for speculation. Dahlem’s works are based on the conviction that natural science is not able to understand reality comprehensively. He thus uses various media—drawing, video, sculpture, and installations—to create his very own art of engagement with the microcosm and the macrocosm. This enables individual access to central issues of humanity located beyond the enlightenment idea of absolute truths. Dahlem’s works create new possibilities that can stand in the face of uncertainty.

The arrangement of material in space is a subject of interest to both physics and sculpture and creates a link between these two disciplines. Dahlem uses simple materials like wood, copper, or bronze, but also foam or Christmas tree ornaments to create complex works that always reveal their assembled character while at the same time seem to transcend it. They grow and meander, condensing to form strange shapes of great complexity and at the same time of astonishingly clear structures. The artists uses them to investigate and visualize the still incomprehensible or inconceivable, subjects that can be found on the edge of human imagination. Their simple materiality radically contrasts with the high-tech materials that are usually associated with future-oriented missions to outer space or the constructions used in technological research allowing a completely autonomous visual language to develop.

Astrophysics and particle physics are realms in which the question of the possibilities of visualization is posed in a special way: how can objects of research be depicted that are not visible to the naked eye? All the same, like most sciences, they cannot do entirely without images. They appear in various forms and are also primarily considered tools to illustrate knowledge that is generated in other ways and present it in a supposedly objective way. Questioning this tendency and understanding visuality as a genuine means of cognition that enables knowledge has in recent years been a focus of visual studies. Dahlem understands his works in the same way: they are an originary means of expression of an engagement with the subject in question and represent a specific, unique form of knowledge.

Björn Dahlem was born in Munich in1974. He studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and has held a professorship in Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig since 2012. Dahlem lives and works in Krampnitz just outside of Berlin.