Bjørn Melhus

Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.

In reference to the trailer of Psycho (USA 1960), narrated in German by Alfred Hitchcock himself, a gardener with a chainsaw guides us through the premises of the Herbert Gerisch Foundation in Schleswig-Holstein 51 years later. The visit ends, just like in the original trailer…, in a bathroom.

A short story about new bodies, the power of denial, and a state of no sunshine. Two infantile bodies float in a cyberspace ball, connected by two subconscious bodies in the background. The attempt at unification and metamorphosis is interrupted by one part as the other is liberated. A glance over the shoulder means destruction.

When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.

“The End Time” was developed for the exhibition Spectral Afterlives at Sprengel Museum Hannover on occasion of the publication of “Spectral Afterlives – Bjørn Melhus and his Media Doubles” with an essay by Elisabeth Bronfen. The focus of the 4-channel video installation is a fictional “Dorothy”. In dreamlike episodes，she recites quotations from the film “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and the television series “China Beach” (1988-1991) against the background of the Central Vietnamese jungle and in opposition to an overbearing moon. Melhus refers to two events, the 1969 moon landing and the Vietnam War (1955-1975)，which received worldwide media attention.

With her green bow in her hair, a naïve Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz embodies an aspect of the artist’s own personal context. She is dreaming about going beyond the confines of her urban surroundings, amongst thousands of flickering windows in apartment blocks, to travel somewhere over the rainbow. As she stumbles upon her yellow brick road, a bedside telephone, her communications take her far far away, becoming entangled in her obsession with connecting to this far away place. Swept into a cyclone of dizzying imagery, she becomes somewhat more realized, sceptical about who she is and her dreams. Much like the ubiquity of television, her dreams are nothing more than commodified imagination that has nonetheless shaped her life. In this fairy-tale land, she desperately tries to find her way back home.

Referencingthe death scene of Sol Roth, played by Edward G. Robinson, in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, and old man on a hospital bed moves through an endless hallway and reflects in a monologue on the 11years of his life and how husmands were able to avoid their own extinciton.