Till Bödeker, Tilt, at Coelner Zimmer, Düsseldorf

When the ground shifts beneath our feet, it’s rarely due to an earthquake. More often, it’s our gaze that falters, tilting like a camera forcing the horizon line, like a mind teetering between the right move and a nervous collapse. Tilt, the title of Till Bödeker’s exhibition at Coelner Zimmer in Düsseldorf, is more than a technical reference, it’s a state of mind, a psychological gesture. Entering the space feels like stepping into a blind spot of perception, a liminal zone where the real and the simulated flirt with, mimic, and interrupt each other. We are no longer mere viewers, we become players, constantly wagering on the authenticity of what we perceive.

The exhibition opens with a distinct sense of suspension. The room, clinical and precisely staged, is populated by silent, semi-sentient presences: screens broadcasting elusive images, orange machines resting on wooden pallets, industrial robots adorned with ring lights mounted like profane halos. The cold lighting and sterile acoustics evoke a laboratory more than a gallery, and we move through the space with the cautious curiosity of those who fear disrupting a conversation already in progress.

At some point, we found ourselves wondering whether machines, too, feel nostalgia, and if so, for what.

There is no prescribed route, nor does the show pretend to offer one. Vertical images lean against walls in quiet defiance of the classical frame, monitors float mid-air like dislocated windows, and the KUKA robot, choreographed yet never quite tamed, adds a dissonant, almost theatrical rhythm to the experience. Each installation proposes a destabilized point of view, a shift in perception or meaning, an invitation to unlearn what we thought we knew about space, time, and materiality.

One of the images seemed to be chasing its own tail, but perhaps we were the ones circling around it.

From a technical standpoint, Bödeker composes an intermedial symphony where no element, be it video, photography, or industrial mechanics, remains pure or isolated. Drones, flying through the exhibition space itself, render us secondary witnesses, layering a disembodied gaze atop our embodied one. Photographs, manipulated through tilt-shift techniques, distort scale and compress depth until the landscape resembles a model, a miniature fiction of the real. The robot, emblem of productive efficiency, becomes a performer, mimicking human gestures only to reveal their choreographic absurdity.

Striking is the tension between the raw and the refined: industrial frameworks, mechanical parts, and transport pallets clash deliberately with sleek, high-definition imagery. The result is a visual friction that mirrors the conceptual core of the exhibition: are we still able to discern the human from the mechanical, the natural from the engineered, or are we already “on tilt,” like poker players chasing patterns in algorithmic chaos?

We no longer remember if it was a sound or merely a thought making all that noise.

In the final room, our footsteps on the parquet floor sound louder than usual. We leave, it seems, with a renewed awareness of the body’s weight in space. And yet something remains misaligned. Perhaps it’s the memory of that mechanical eye that followed us, unblinking and unjudging. Or maybe it’s the image of an aerial landscape that felt less like a place and more like a mental topography.
Tilt doesn’t offer answers, it offers angles. And perhaps the only way to find balance again is to lose it, just once more.