Wolf Kahlen is a media and object artist who is one of the pioneers of German video. In 1969 he produced his first video sculpture with a television set, TV-Spiegel; several artistic works with the medium of television will follow. He created videos such as S.C.H.A.F.E. (1975), which were also shown in installations. Kahlen’s art is characterized by working with borderline aesthetic experiences and integrating the viewers into the work, for example, in ADA2-Schule (1974), as part of the exhibition Aktionen der Avantgarde (ADA2). In this school, the participating artists, including Amelith, Daniel Buren, Jochen Gerz, Edward Kienholz, and Jannis Kounellis, presented their contributions and at the same time discussed the social role of art in opposition to traditional bourgeois ideas of art. Given the intermedial quality of his “tapeless” video sculptures, Kahlen began calling himself a “media sculptor.” In 1971 the Videothek of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, as the Video-Forum was then known, was opened with the 16 mm film Reversible Prozesse by Kahlen, one of the founding members. In seven essays, the first film shows Kahlen’s experiments with the body, which were staged especially for the camera. In these essays Kahlen was exploring how the statically fixed film camera relates to the still camera: the moving image permits a new experience of space and time and the complete documentation of the reversible processes. In Trespassing, Kahlen walks through a wall and analyzes every single step. Using a white square on the skin of his back, the formation and disappearance of levels of tanning is shown in Selbstversuch IV. The body is always related to elements of space, such as the built environment (wall) or natural forces (light). Kahlen’s films are communicative models for raising the awareness of the viewers and for always communicating reality as an actively reproduced and repeated process.

ADA I - Aktionen der Avantgarde

Sep 9, 1973 – Oct 3, 1973