Tatjana Vall, Warm Silver Skies at BRITTA RETTBERG, Munich

Warm Silver Skies by Tatjana Vall at BRITTA RETTBERG, Munich, from February 14 to March 29, 2025.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

There is something deeply human, and therefore deeply naïve, about our obsession with shrinking the infinite into a manageable image. We map the sky, turn it into coordinates, describe it with words that make it feel less alien. But space is not a rendering, and Tatjana Vall’s Warm Silver Skies reminds us of this. Here, the cosmos is not an open frontier but a conceptual trap, where our desire for knowledge clashes with the limits of perception.

Stepping into the exhibition, we find ourselves in a space that oscillates between a scientific laboratory and a sci-fi film set. Videos, sculptures, and wall-based works create an environment where time seems to stretch and space fragments into uncertainty. There is no linear narrative, just a lingering sense that each image is on the verge of revealing something, only to slip away the moment we try to grasp it.

Vall’s mechanical sculptures resemble scientific instruments, but they lack any clear function. They feel like remnants of a future that has already passed, artifacts from a post-human era where technology is no longer a tool for understanding but something to be observed in itself. There is a strange familiarity to them, structures that seem to breathe, surfaces that reflect light with an almost organic intelligence.

The video works amplify this tension between fascination and deception. Through the camera’s eye, space becomes an abstraction, galaxies dissolving into digital textures, alien landscapes that feel more like simulations than real places. Vall exposes our tendency to turn the unfathomable into an image, to convince ourselves that a camera, a rendering, a composition can make the cosmos less distant.

This is the paradox we face: the more science (and science fiction) convinces us that space is accessible, the more Vall reminds us that it remains fundamentally beyond our grasp. Warm Silver Skies subtly but powerfully exposes how our visions of the future, and of space, are often more about comfort than truth.

And so, we return to Huxley’s words: we want poetry, we want risk, we want mystery. But perhaps we are not ready to accept that the universe is precisely that, a place that does not belong to us, one we cannot translate into images. And maybe, in the end, that’s exactly how it should be.

• Fakewhale