BABYLON, Rosa-Luxemburgplatz, Berlin, big cinema hall
(Eintritt frei | admission free)
Bjørn Melhus is showing a selection of his works:
rarely or never seen before!
Ever since Neil Postman’s efforts, the phenomenon of society’s medialisation has been analysed interms of the intrusion of television, film and video-clip as substitutes for communication andexperience. The human being has been transformed into a passive consumer of mass-producedmedia fare. The distinctions between entertainment, dream, trauma and information become increasingly blurred. Ready-made sound-bite meanings are being served up around the clock. Experiencing the real world seems to have become redundant. Against this background, Melhus builds his own fables and stories from fragments taken from theworld of motion pictures assembled by association into collages of sound and image. In doing so, heconsistently plays all the roles himself and underlays them with a soundtrack of famous, mostlydeceased movie stars whose male and female voices and statements the artists puts into his ownmouth.
Since “Zauberglas” (magic glass, 1991) or “Again and Again” (1998), his core concerns arequestions of personal identity, where we come from and where we go to and the boundary between oneself and the media world.
Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 2010
