CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 7

are subsequently called into question by subtle
disruptions that arise from engaging with the work.
Comparable to the literary trope of an unreliable
narrator, Keller’s works create situations that carefully
destabilize customary viewing positions: Be it literally
invoking an empathic loss of control from watching
test subjects getting high on laughing gas, observing
the artist spin around his axis until he passes out, or
becoming complicit with a colonizing gaze watching
anthropological footage. 7 Notes:
1) Keller has used the term “observatorium” to
describe this aspect.
While engaging the viewer in tacit or explicit ways,
Keller remains fully cognizant of his own position in
this dynamic. A model for such a discursive exchange
with his audience/the viewer is also integral to the
works; found in his dialogues, conversations and
collaborations with others, be they artists, scientists,
researchers, or experts of all kind. 8 Both his subjects
and the audience are always addressed as an equal,
their autonomy assured. Indeed, Keller’s willing
adoption of different roles, as producer of objects,
anthropologist, journalist or test subject, surfaces as a
subtle self-reflectiveness, a mindful acknowledgment
of the self-seriousness shared by artistic and scientific
inquiry. 3) Paranomia, 2018, p. 36.
Keller’s oeuvre addresses science and myth,
technology and notions of the self, engaging the
viewer in an ongoing, open-ended artistic dialogue
that transforms the gallery/exhibition space into a
site of experimentation, a discursive space of shared
inquiry.
– Isabelle Moffat
2) See his 2015 exhibition Grey Magic on the
theory of “eccentric sensation” in Ernst Marcus and
Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, Retrograd-a reverse
chronology of the medical films made at the
Berlin hospital Charité 1900-1990 (1999/2000), and
Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001).
4) See Cloudbuster Project (since 2003), Small
Survey of Nothingness (2014), the exhibition
Aether—from Cosmology to Consciousness at the
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011 and Grey Magic.
5) Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”,
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, MIT Press, 1985, p. 288.
6) Exhibited at the first Berlin Biennale, the 10,5 meters
long Rundumbild S-Bahn created a disorienting
spatial experience based on visual registering a
temporal process.
7) See Verbal/ Nonverbal (2010), Whirling until I
drop (2008), Shaman-Travel (2002).
8) This emphasis recalls Keller’s activity in artist
collectives in post-1989 Berlin. Distinct from the
experience of artists trained in the master classes of
the German art academies, the 1990s Berlin scene
was characterized by a collectivist search for new
artistic and intellectual frameworks. Informed by the
redefinition of artistic practice and the interrogation of
notions of authorship, authenticity, intentionality and
exhibitions as displays of concrete objects, Keller’s
circles had no masters and instead, perhaps rather in
a late resonance of Berlin Dada, engaged in collective
discourse, political discussions and actions.
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