CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 48

OBSERVATOIRES, ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN, 2007
Christoph Keller’s exhibition centered on a telescope switched from receive to broadcast—its con-
cave mirror reflected the light beam from a slide projector that was sent zigzagging via further mir-
rors through the darkened gallery space and finally, through an open window, outside. The pictures
projected in this way had already been in space for thirty years. In coded form, they became part of
the Voyager 1 & 2 space probe missions in 1977 that were supposed to explain planet Earth, hu-
mankind and human culture to a potential extraterrestrial finder: a time capsule that will not enter the
next planetary system for at least another 40,000 years. The ideal viewer of these pictures projected
outside using a telescope is thus not to be found in the gallery space, where they are visible only in
the barely perceptible form of a fleeting light beam. With his installation, Christoph Keller gave this
anthropocentric but no less epic attempt at communication via space travel a decisive turn that
revealed the crux of astronomy.
Rendering the universe visible and discovering its universal laws, as attempted by astronomy, aims
not least to create a point of view from which the earth, and finally mankind itself, can be observed
from outside. The exhibition radicalized this claim by pointing to its blind spots. For the viewer, the
structure of the archive of found images of observatories set up by Christoph Keller and displayed in
the form of lightboxes and single black and white photographs, remained opaque.
The video Tour Solaire also begins with such a reversal. From the viewing platform of a disused
observatory, the camera glides over the panorama of Paris and finally turns to the inside of the tower.
Accompanied by the soundtrack from Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, a circular walk through the aban-
doned observatory unfolds, which is turned into a psychological interior. Exposed to scrutiny, the
observatory itself becomes a silent monument to a foreign culture: the instrument of a science that is
haunted by its own fictionalization.
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