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Wolf Kahlen
VIDEO TAPES 1969-2010
9.09 – 29.10.2010
Opening: 9.09.2010, 19:00
Wolf Kahlen (born in 1940) has worked in many media, creating classics of video art, photography, performance art, installations and sculptures. A professor at the Berlin Technical University, in 1971 Kahlen co-founded the Video Forum at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the first video-art collection in Germany. He is the director of the Ruine der Künste gallery for material and immaterial art, which he opened in 1985 in what was then West Berlin. Kahlen has taken part in over 600 individual and group exhibitions, and his works are featured in major collections around the world.
Kahlen’s involvement with the Polish art scene started in the early 1970s, when he was one of the key figures initiating dialog among German and Polish artists and organizing informal exchange programs for both works and artists. He was one of the first to use closed-circuit video in performance art in Poland; and he created the sound sculpture Breslauer Tisch [Wrocław's Table] specially for the WRO 90 Sound Basis Visual Art Festival.
The retrospective exhibition Video Tapes 1969-2010 is the first survey of Kahlen’s work to be presented in Poland. Marking Kahlen’s 70th birthday, the show has been prepared jointly by the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Ruine der Künste in Berlin and the WRO Art Center. It includes 163 restored and digitalized video and film works, media installations, video sculptures, photographs and documentation of performances and conceptual actions. At the Wrocław show, works from the Wolf Kahlen Museum in Bernau will be accompanied by pieces found in Polish collections: the National Museum in Wrocław, the Potocka Gallery and the archives of the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin. The extensive exhibition catalog was produced and published by the Ruine der Künste.
