Christoph KilianChristoph Kilian – If you touch me, you’ll understand what happiness is, Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, 2017, Courtesy of the Artist
In a cross-media interplay and clash with technology, Christoph Kilian constructs machinic tales that — often on the verge of futility — trace the magical. In 2017, he developed If you touch me, you’ll understand what happiness is (Goethe-Institut Los Angeles), for which he collaborated with experimental snow physicists to create an artificial snow crystal, grown inside a small cooling chamber carried aloft by a weather balloon over Mount Hollywood, where it fell into the summer sky. In the summer of 2024, he brought a cat long believed extinct back to life with The California Snow Leopard at gallery PAGE (NYC): Visible only through a telescope, an animatronic sculpture sat on the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper 400 meters away. Between Lilies, shown in Salzburg from 2024 to 2025, wove visitors into a semi-artificial neural network animated by electronically augmented white lilies as they withered. At the destination of an upcoming cargo ship voyage, he will release an electronic message in a bottle in the Bermuda Triangle, which will then endeavor to return to where it originated. As a prelude to the journey, he presented Dem Grund so nah (To Whom It May Concern) at Raum Matjö, Cologne, in 2022, featuring an object that might have served as a mold for the message in a bottle.

Christoph Kilian, studied media art at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He lives between Cologne, Salzburg, and Los Angeles, where he completed a guest semester at the ArtCenter College of Design in 2014 and has been an artist-in-residence at the UCLA Art|Sci Center since 2020. Christoph Kilian is a member of the interdisciplinary network Waterbodies, which brings together artistic, scientific, and anthropological approaches to water and its significance as an element reflecting the fate of humanity.

www.christophkilian.de