Noise & Beauty

The sound and media artist Timo Kahlen (b. 1966) has for more than 25 years created subtle, unsettling and bewitching media sculptures and sound installations, some of them transient, that always challenge the viewer’s perception. Kahlen delights in crossing the boundaries between individual artistic genres and extending them with unusual materials and surprising approaches. His multifaceted oeuvre, and his work with materials as diverse as they are invariably immaterial and ephemeral – wind and steam, light and shadow, radiation, noise and sound – is often ahead of its time. It has been nominated for the “German Sound Art Prize” (“Deutscher Klangkunst-Preis”, 2006), the “Kahnweiler Prize for Sculpture” (“Kahnweiler-Preis für Skulptur”, 2001) and the “Prize for Young European Photographers” (“Preis für Junge Europäische Photographen”, 1989); it led to his being proposed as a candidate for professorships in media art, formed the basis for teaching appointments at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin and for project and work residencies, and has been recognised through participation in more than ninety exhibitions of contemporary media art since the mid-1980s, including invitations to “Manifesta 7” (Italy, 2008), “Sound Art” (Cologne, 2006), “Wireless Experience” (Helsinki, 2004) and “Time Sculpture” (“Zeitskulptur”; Linz, 1997), and, among others, the solo exhibition “Working with Wind” (“Arbeiten mit Wind”) at the Kunst-Werke, Berlin, in 1991.

Studied at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin under Prof. Dieter Appelt from 1985 to 1994; appointed master-class student (Meisterschüler) of the Hochschule der Künste Berlin in 1993

Documentation of selected wind, light and sound installations, experimental photographic and video works, and interactive net art works
at http://www.staubrauschen.de