by Annalisa Giacinti, studio photos by Ryan Molnar // July 7, 2026
Across contemporary pop culture, visions of transcendence have come back with renewed urgency, as if cultural production, be it music, film or fiction, were dreaming up possibilities of salvation amid technological and political despair. Take Rosalía’s ‘LUX,’ released at the end of last year, which sublimates pop into spirituality. In ‘Berghain,’ the orchestral lead single from the album, Björk takes over the bridge to sing a sacred maxim: “The only way to save us is through divine intervention.” Or recent sci-fi blockbusters like ‘Project Hail Mary’ and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day,’ which envision planetary survival as contingent on civic duties and new forms of interspecies communication.
For Bjørn Melhus, such questions have long been familiar. Visions of the apocalypse, war, utopian remedies and exit strategies—as circulated by media, entertainment, religion and tech bros—have inhabited his work for 40 years, during which he made over 70 films and video installations. When I visit him in his Prenzlauer Berg studio, he’s preparing for ‘Lost in Finity,’ a major solo exhibition opening this July at Silent Green, which will place many of these works on a journey of “destruction and redemption.” He’s wearing a totally black outfit, including a SECURITY t-shirt, which feels appropriate for the task of guiding me through it.
“This is essential to see,” he says, as he points at the spot on the architectural model of the exhibition space where ‘Sudden Destruction’ will be shown in full length. “It’s a trailer for the end of the world.” The video—made in 2012, when a series of eschatological beliefs and conspiracy theories based on a misreading of the Mayan calendar had us believe doomsday was upon us—shows a man in a hotel, a newscaster and a corpse under a sheet that suddenly awakens to prophesies of the end gushing out of his mouth, edited to sound “more like the exorcist” than a recipe for survival. “I started to watch YouTube videos about people waking up with dreams about the apocalypse. Everyone had a vision and everyone was suddenly a self-proclaimed prophet.” He calls them “a mix out of Hollywood and the Bible, like trash TV.”
Melhus lived in Los Angeles, and then in New York City when 9/11 happened. He recalls “running away from the collapsing towers” and the sudden, daunting realization that what we speculate or conspire about may actually occur in our timelines—or as he puts it: “Shit happens.” Life in the US reinforced his fascination with the entertainment industry, Hollywood and the aesthetics of late capitalism, resulting in the fragmented, collage-like and ironic style of his video works. He is intrigued by the apocalypse’s constant prelude and simultaneous denial, the coexistence of “apocalyptic fetishism” and “fetishist denial,” in the words of Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, whom Melhus has been drawing inspiration from. He’s been researching alternative futures, both in early sci-fi literature—like the 1908 novel ‘Red Star,’ written by Russian writer Alexander Bogdanov about a Communist utopian society living on Mars—as well as in the colonization programs of trillionaire companies like SpaceX. He also enjoys some of the radical takes published in the online Capitalism Magazine, which is “a magazine for capitalists,” he half-jokingly clarifies.
Further along in the exhibition, a quote from ‘The Divine Comedy’ sets off a descent through a Dantesque forest, towards hell. In 2024, Melhus did a residency at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, where he made ‘REVELATION’, the exhibition’s central piece, a diptyque inspired by the ‘The Book of Revelation’ and Max Beckmann’s series of Apocalypse lithographs, on top of catholic symbols and the city’s visual codes—“It’s very much inspired by all the frescoes, like a lot of clouds, angels, horses, a dragon.” (The box containing Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ as a puzzle, resting on what looks like an altar made from a yellow, paper-covered box, is another souvenir from his time in Italy). Another video from 2011 called ‘I’m Not the Enemy’ follows. It explores war and post-traumatic stress disorder, and shows a soldier appearing and disappearing in a loop; “It’s not a film, but more like a cuckoo clock,” he warns. Towards the end, the exhibition shifts into the post-human, with “projections of faceless statues in a garden at night” and images of the “post-post-apocalypse”.
Despite its engagement with digital media, Melhus’ work remains surprisingly hands-on. Much of the process involves researching, writing, filming and editing, carried out largely alone. Editing is the most time-consuming part of his practice, which often extends well into the night. In keeping with the exhibition’s expectation of devising one long seamless journey, he has to meticulously cut and synchronize every video so that they play off one another. And so, while each screen runs on a continuous loop, its timing is adjusted to create a single linear narrative. Melhus famously performs all of the characters himself, too, lip-syncing voice samples gathered across his sources. Back in 2023, he began experimenting with generative AI, but was soon dissatisfied. The resulting images felt somewhat “generic and boring,” ultimately prompting the opposite course of action: “I wanted to put some make up on my face, cut a trumpet out of cardboard and be extremely analog,” he emphasizes. To this day, he’s used AI to upscale two of his early low-res videos, while the rest maintain their original quality.
The studio is a place for “big experiments,” Melhus looks around fondly. It changes every week, taking on the guise of whatever he’s working on at that time. When I visit, a white curtain hangs from a circular rod in the middle of the space, a test for a Star Trek-inspired transporter room that the artist hopes to install at the end of the Silent Green exhibition. Many more space motifs are scattered around. Opposite the elevator entrance, a monitor loops footage of a rocket taking off. An astronaut Barbie sits on a shelf across the room, while sci-fi classics, like ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Total Recall,’ ‘Moon’ or the original Lynch ‘Dune’ make up his dense film library. Along one long wall, two sets of shelves offer a glimpse into his working method: one devoted to research, filled with books and source material collected over time; the other containing “the output of that research”: artist books, exhibition catalogs and artworks.
Melhus bought the studio a little over 20 years ago, when the neighborhood was still very affordable. With time, though, he’s become a bit alienated from it: “It used to be so different, now it’s full of shops selling things nobody needs, and all these people doing pilates in the courtyard.” He plans on leaving in a few years, after the studio has been here for “a quarter of a century” and moving back to Rome. “The idea is to create something new in the third act of my life.” Last year, together with two fellow artists, Melhus bought a space in the city, which they want to turn into a project room. “It’s another idea of utopia,” he predicts—his very own exit fantasy.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
silent green
Bjørn Melhus: ‘Lost in Finity’
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 16; 7pm
Exhibition: July 17-Aug. 23, 2026
silent-green.net
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map
