CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 24

GREY MAGIC, ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN, 2015
Grey Magic brought together themes from Keller’s ongoing aether project, his engagement with
fringe science and with parapsychological ideas. The exhibition combined sculptural interventions
with the setting for staging a psychological experiment, a series of prints, and a film project that was
filmed during the course of the exhibition in the gallery space.
A large-scale mirror installation formed a spiral that united both rooms of the gallery. Made from
more than 130 individual suspended sections that had slight play, the elements aligned and de-
aligned as coherent presence, showing in turn the mirrored surface on one and the pattern based
on Keller’s spiral drawings on their other side. In the second room, enclosed by part of the spiral, a
sensorial experiment, Mental Radio, requested visitors to take part in a psychological test involving
telepathic image transference. In the front room, visible from the outside, was an illuminated work,
Title Tool for an Imaginary Cinema. A series of prints, installed in both spaces, combined draw-
ings of spirals with Keller’s chapter-by-chapter summaries of Grey Magic, a 1922 novel by Salomo
Friedlaender/Mynona that gave the exhibition its title.
Keller’s exhibition took as point of departure the deep entanglement in early twentieth century Berlin
Bohème circles where scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, actors, and other creative gures
exchanged ideas. This period, dating roughly from 1906 to just after World War I, found a particularly
enchanting, now somewhat forgotten expression in Mynona’s book.
24