Falko Alexander, Cologne, 2022 — Pics or It Didn't Happen: the white cube filled with the iconography of the forums.
2015 – 2025
Selected solo and group exhibitions from ten years — in the white cube, in public space, and on the blockchain. Mostly shown as solo presentations, in a few cases in collaboration. Assembled from the documentation of each show.
curation & projects
positions gathers the exhibitions of the past years in one place. The same material runs across the rooms: the language of the platform, the screen as a painting ground, economy as a subject, and the sentence on the wall that sounds like advertising and means the opposite. The white cube and public space are treated alike, as display.
The details of venue, year and photography are taken from the archive of each show. The accompanying texts are offered as a reading — an interpretation of the works, not the official description of the exhibition.
2025 · kunsthalle.köln — solo exhibition
A solo exhibition at kunsthalle.köln, the digital exhibition architecture for digital art sited at Ebertplatz in Cologne. Kuhlmann shows works from the ongoing series REDEFINING THE MATRIX — here and now: screen and print works that carry the language of the platform onto the wall. In parallel, in the basement of the virtual Kunsthalle, runs the collaboration with the art and media theorist Hans Ulrich Reck, NFTalkie Walkies: instead of the visual unique, an edition of three spoken lectures anchored as NFTs on the blockchain, €20 each. Reck speaks; Kuhlmann takes on concept, interface design and the minting. The lectures circle around image and medium, the archive and its promise of eternity, and the question of art, technology and a possible humanism today.
Digital exhibition space at Ebertplatz · NFTalkie Walkies with Hans Ulrich Reck
2022 · Falko Alexander, Cologne — online only
A show that only ever existed online. There was never a physical exhibition in the gallery — every view here was composed with digital tools and published on the net.
A solo show whose title quotes the imperative of the network: only what has been photographed and shared counts as having happened. Fittingly, it never took physical form. Across digitally composed rooms a white cube fills with the iconography of the forums — Chad and Soyboy, galaxies, meme faces — as wallpapers, floor works and screens that exist as images rather than objects. Your deep will to submit, Do You Still Trust Me / Asking for the Friend, Only the Bots Know the Truth: sentences that carry the language of the platform into a room that was only ever rendered, where their tenderness and their threat unfold at once. The show weighs what remains of an event when its proof becomes more important than the event itself.
Photos: Marta Vovk
2019 · Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
A solo exhibition about the language of the platform and the wish to be free within it. Framed emoticons — :-), LOL, :-( — hang like a new alphabet of feeling; a bracket pair, { }, is captioned This Is Not a Hug. On the wall the sentence Someone Made a Very Disturbing Comment Under My Post; on the floor and against the walls the screens, one of them insisting that Only the Bots Know the Truth. A grid of framed prints doubles from two to five hundred and twelve — an artgame as a capitalistic ritual. The room reads as the inside view of a consciousness that has learned to think in the categories of the interface.
Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
2017 · Tiefgarage am Ebertplatz, Cologne
A solo presentation with performance and talk in the exhibition space of the Tiefgarage at Ebertplatz. On the wall the statement Art Was a Joke and the Bourgeoisie Has No Irony; in the room the founding of the International Non Society — "founded by the Friends of Non in July 2017 in Cologne" — and the stacked aluminium cans Metamodern Sein Jetzt. Running alongside is the conceptual fiction of performing the figure Florian Kuhlmann live one last time, in order to hand its further development over to a cloud-based bot network. The show plays with authorship, irony and the disappearance of the artist behind his own figure.
Photos: Alec Crichton
2015 · Galerie am Meer, Düsseldorf
The solo exhibition of 9 October 2015, strictly conceptual and built for the white cube. In the first room the typographic text installation CTRL-S: three almost identical sentences in black letters on a white wall — "'JPG' written in black Arial on white canvas saved as png.gif". In the second room the video projection CTRL-S RGB, which carries the same form into the colour space of red, green and blue, so that colour word and colour never coincide. It is about control, safety and image — and about saving as an everyday gesture of a society that looks for security in the saving of pictures.
Photos: Lars Klostermann
projects — floriankuhlmann.com