Christoph Keller

Christoph Keller was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1967 and lives and works in Berlin. He studied mathematics, physics, and hydrology in Freiburg, Berlin, and Santiago de Chile before pursuing liberal arts at the Berlin University of the Arts under Katharina Sieverding. He subsequently attended the postgraduate programme in film and art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His multidisciplinary practice brings artistic experimentation into dialogue with scientific methods and the history and organisation of knowledge. Keller emerged as a distinctive voice in the late 1990s, developing a visual language that functions as a "meta-analysis" of scientific methodology and its systems of classification. He received the Ars Viva Art Award in 2000 and was awarded the Rome Prize and a residency at the German Academy at Villa Massimo in 2017. His practice encompasses large-scale sculptural interventions, photography, experimental film, exhibition-making, and documented psychological experiments. His long-term projects frequently address the history of Western European anthropology—particularly its engagement with the Amazon region—as well as the "fringe" territories of parapsychology and other disputed fields of knowledge. Throughout his career, Keller has developed a methodology of "artistic research" that questions the often-arbitrary boundaries between established science and subjective or marginalised forms of belief. His projects investigate the "politics of the archive," examining subjects ranging from European representations of the Amazon to the scientific and philosophical history of the aether. By adopting the visual and organisational tools of laboratories, archives, and museums, he explores an "archaeology of the future," asking how the collection, classification, and presentation of information influence human thought and collective memory. Keller has presented solo projects at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Schering Stiftung in Berlin, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. His work has also appeared in major group exhibitions and international events, including the Sharjah Biennial, the Lyon Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. In addition to the Ars Viva Art Award and the Villa Massimo residency, Keller has received a Goethe-Institut project residency in Mexico City, a research fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and an artist fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, which included research at the Getty Research Institute. His practice continues to explore the intersections of cosmology, consciousness, anthropology, and the history of science, exposing the limitations of established systems of knowledge while opening them to speculation and alternative forms of inquiry.