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.
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.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, including screenings and talks. Information about the program at: www.silent-green.net.
17 July – 23 August 2026 | Betonhalle
Opening: Thu, 16 July, Doors: 7 pm / Start: 7:30 pm
Opening hours: Tue to Fri, 2 to 8 pm / Sat to Sun, 11 am to 8 pm
Free admission
The solo exhibition LOST IN FINITY is a project of silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH. Supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.