Melhus: [dramatic music continues]

Bjørn Melhus
[dramatic music continues]
28.04.–17.06.2023
Ebensperger BerlinGallery Weekend Berlin
Thursday–Friday, 27.04.–28.04., 11 am–6 pm (previews)
Friday, 28.04., 6–9 pm (public)
Saturday, 29.04., 11 am–7 pm (public)
Sunday, 30.04., 11 am–6 pm (public) Index of worksThe exhibition brings together video works by Bjørn Melhus from between 2020 and 2023 that explore, among other things, transhistoric narratives of dystopia and utopia. After having done his first solo show at the gallery's premises in the former Crematorium Wedding ten years ago, Melhus' third solo show also marks the last one at this location.The exhibition title “[dramatic music continues]” is a so-called closed caption, an audio description from feature films for people who cannot hear, a service provided by most streaming services. Thus the title is paradigmatic for the present time and not least also a reference to my artistic practice, which in the last three decades has been based predominantly on the extraction of mass media audio material.The title also describes a privileged state in which the sound of the ongoing catastrophe can be muted and the doom is only perceptible as an abstract description in closed captions.The series Gatekeepers (2023) is a new production for this year’s Gallery Weekend. They are mutating, fictional guards; watchmen or bouncers from another world who ambivalently stand guard at the threshold of an apparent transition. It remains open whether they are concerned with the control of spatial borders, which are becoming increasingly impermeable due to global distribution struggles, or an immune defence that prevents the invasion of new kinds of diseases into one's own organism.made with Lay Theme