WOLF KAHLEN, Bilder (k)einer Ausstellung, Ruine der Künste, Berlin, 2000

Artist-issued

Invitation to the first part of Kahlen’s ten-part, three-year retrospective Bilder (k)einer Ausstellung (2000–2003), opening at Ruine der Künste, Berlin, on 7 January 2000 — Kahlen’s 60th birthday. The recto reproduces his photographic work Selbstversuch II (1969), a four-part photo-canvas piece showing an inverted self-portrait with a positive print layered over the chest, Kahlen’s signature running vertically at the right edge.

The verso announces both the exhibition and Selbst-los / Self-less, an interactive internet work launched simultaneously and made available worldwide for visitors to print from the web. Its inclusion here — website address, email and fax contact printed alongside — gives the card an inadvertent historical precision: a document of the moment when artist-run spaces and early web distribution briefly occupied the same printed surface.

Kahlen had worked with film, video, photography, performance and installation since the late 1960s and is an early figure in German video art. He co-initiated the Video Forum at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and later founded Ruine der Künste as an artist-run exhibition and publishing space. The ten-part retrospective it hosted between 2000 and 2003 is independently documented as a sustained self-examination across four decades of practice.

The card connects several layers of Kahlen’s work at once: a 1969 photographic self-image, a 2000 retrospective, the artist-run institution and an early web-distributed work — all on a single piece of printed ephemera, signed.

Verso bears a later pink rubber-stamp addition ("täglich 15–19 Uhr" / daily 3–7pm) giving the exhibition's regular viewing hours, applied after printing..