Presenting WOLF KAHLEN, one of the pioneers of VIDEO ART since the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the occasion of his 70th birthday and the 25th anniversary of the RUINE DER KÜNSTE BERLIN, the exhibition is a comprehensive retrospective of all 158 video tapes to date: ranging from 'Seven Reversible Processes' (1969) to most recent works, as 'Kissing Chewing and Inhaling' (2009). From the beginning, Wolf Kahlen's interest was to introduce 'time' as a tangible material: a material of nonlinear endless processes, the coming and going, the 'endless dance' of matter and beings. 'Trespassing' a wall (1971), seen from both sides, or showing in a meditative, but fruitless video portrait, of how 'I can't get hold of her' (1975), or documenting the search for and enthronement of a reincarnative Tibetan child, the bodily return of Serkong Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama's former teachers, thus pointing out the cycling processes of life. A number of his early (1969) and recent video sculptures, in which Kahlen works with technology and nature in contrast, complete the show. After its initial stage in Berlin, the exhibition will travel to the Museum Folkwang Essen (June-July), to the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (July-September) and to WRO Centrum Sztuki Wroclaw / Poland (September-November 2010). To be continued in 2011/12. Wolf Kahlen, born in 1940, calls himself a 'media sculptor' working in all media: including the body, animals and trees, clouds, sound and photography, architecture and words. He has held teaching positions in the US as early as the 1970s, in China in 1990, at the Bauhaus Dessau in 1992, in Eastern Europe and Berlin from the 1980s until 2005. He has presented his work in more than 150 one-man shows, and has participated at Documenta 6 in Kassel, 1977, amongst other and numerous group exhibitions. His works have been included in various public museums in Europe, China, Poland, the US etc. In 1971 Kahlen founded the first public video art production and collection center, the Videoforum Berlin, in 1973/74 initiated Actions of the Avantgarde ADA with artist friends like Merz, Buren, Vostell, Gerz, Filliou. In 1985 Kahlen founded the RUINE DER KÜNSTE BERLIN ('a private space for material and immaterial arts'), in 2005 the WOLF KAHLEN MUSEUM - Intermedia Arts Museum in Bernau, near Berlin. Since 1985 he has researched and documented, as an artist and a tibetologist, the life and work of a renaissance Tibetan personality, Tang-tong rGyalpo, whom he has coined a 'Leonardo of Tibet'. Kahlen has repeatedly travelled the Himalayan countries, worked for the King of Bhutan as Consultant in Art and Architecture (1985) and has led a first expedition in search of this Tibetan Leonardo. Since 1986 he has travelled to Tibet, Mongolia, Japan and Taiwan to work in video. His first one man show in China dates to 1994. In 1996 he showed 14 video- and dust installations at the Beijing Art Museum, in 1998 at the Shanghai Art Museum and in Taiwan, as well as in Osaka in 1999. As Wolf Kahlen states, 'purely for emotional reasons' the enormous body of 158 video tapes will start the multi-part retrospective at the RUINE DER KÜNSTE BERLIN in May 2010, 'although the place is indeed much too small'. A comprehensive book of 500 pages has been published at the EDITION RUINE DER KÜNSTE BERLIN, presenting 1500 images of all videotapes and numerous texts in German, English, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, translations from Chinese included. It may be ordered at ruine-kuenste.berlin@snafu.de (€ 42 plus shipping).