Timo Kahlen


Timo Kahlen is a German sound sculptor and media artist who currently lives and works in Berlin.

Life and work

Timo Kahlen is known for his sound sculptures and site-specific sound art works, installations with steam, wind and light, as well as experimental net art, video and photography. His interdisciplinary and intermedia body of work, often employing ephemeral, elemental materials such as wind and steam, light and shade, sound and vibration, noise and beauty, has been nominated for the German national Sound Art Prize 2006, the Kahnweiler Prize for Sculpture 2001 and the Prize for Young European Photographers 1989, as well as various scholarships in Washington D.C., Berlin, Paris and Guernsey. Kahlen's work is involved with the sculptural and conceptual aspects of immaterial phenomena and processes, and curators as Joanna Littlejohns have emphasized the ephemeral, "temporary and changeable nature" of his concentrated oeuvre. Kahlen's work has been presented in more than 140 exhibitions and retrospectives of contemporary media art since the mid-1980s, including Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of the Arts, the Mediations Biennale, Tonspur_expanded: The Loudspeaker, Noise & Beauty, 60 × 60, Manifesta 7: Scenarios, Sound Art: German Sound Art Prize 2006, Wireless Experience, Zeitskulptur: Volumen als Ereignis and the solo exhibition Timo Kahlen: Works with Wind, inaugurating the Kunst-Werke in Berlin.
His installation at the Aviation Museum in Amberg in 2010 was disrupted when a cleaner mistakenly vacuumed up the two dead hornets he had placed on a loudspeaker: the installation was titled Tanz für Insekten and the intention was for the dead insects to "dance" as a result of the vibrations. Rather than kill more hornets, he replaced them with dead houseflies.
Kahlen received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Berlin University of the Arts, where he studied under Professor Dieter Appelt and held a lectureship in Visual Media and Video Art from 1993 to 1998.

Exhibitions (selection)