Björn Dahlem has been exploring the connection between aesthetic imagery and scientific world views in his works since the late 1990s. His installations, sculptures and objects are mostly made of simple materials that he transforms into precisely composed and visibly handmade forms incorporating selected objets trouvés. The structural complexity of the works is derived from the intricacy of the cosmological models and astrophysical theories from which Dahlem draws his motifs. With subtle humour, the artist links the findings of natural science with aspects of cultural history and the aesthetics of everyday life and at the same time questions the suggestive power of the scientific construct of the world, whose fundamental relativity he allows to find its material equivalent in the fragility of his sculptures.

Hardly anything has challenged the human thirst for knowledge and stimulated our imagination more than the stars in the sky. The cosmos is both an object of empirical observation and a mental projection surface for us. Accordingly, our knowledge, our conception of the universe not only says something about the universe itself, but also about us humans.

It is this interface at which Björn Dahlem's sculptural poetry moves and about which it deals. And although the title of the current exhibition plays with the promise that it will reveal a cosmic mystery, it is less about the actual resolution of a very concrete celestial mystery. Dahlem rather creates a parcours-like space of experience in which he gives shape to various astrononomical phenomena and theoretical models by means of the sculptural vocabulary specific to him and his practice; be it black holes, cosmic clouds or, as in the case of the main installation within the exhibition, the First Light, which scientists from the jointly responsible astronomy agencies NASA, CSA and ESA are currently tracking down with the help of the James Webb telescope and from whose detection they expect to gain more detailed information about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe in general.

In doing so, Dahlem focuses in particular on the contradictory, the erratic and the hidden, as well as the voids and gaps in the context of space research, and at the same time repeatedly makes allegorical references to completely different, sometimes quite trivial moments in our lives and experiences. In this respect, the universe and its exploration function not least as proxies. After all, Dahlem's sculptural images are always also about us, the human being, in the sense of an extended (self-)portrait according to all that we know, do not know and believe we know about our extraterrestrial environment, the cosmos and its laws. 

Björn Dahlem, born in Munich in 1974, studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Since 2017, he has been a professor for sculpture, object and installation at the Bauhaus University Weimar. His work has been shown in numerous institutions and major exhibitions at home and abroad, including La Triennale di Milano, Milan (2022), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2020), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea (2018); ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2017); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2015); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2014); MoCA, Taipei (2013). Currently, works by him are included in the exhibition It's a World Machine. Kepler, Art & Cosmic Bodies at the ERES Foundation in Munich.

Opening:
Friday, 28 April 2023, 6 to 9 p.m.

Gallery Weekend Berlin:
28 to 30 April 2023

Exhibition duration:
28 April to 10 June 2023

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Exhibition Location:
Guido W. Baudach Gallery
Pohlstrasse 67
10785 Berlin
www.guidowbaudach.com