Malte Taffner's expansive installations must be approached as if we were approaching post-apocalyptic locations or a Tesla or SpaceX showroom. Places and future scenarios that he embraces with refreshing hope and optimism. Utopia meets dystopia, only freed from imposed ideals or megalomaniacal visions. His aesthetic is dry and moist and, in a way, brutalistic. Taffner relies on lifeless materials used in industry and combines them with plant cultures that we also find in botanical gardens or other ecosystems. He creates artificial systems presented as carriers of feigned purposes, balancing his work in an aesthetic between life and death. Drawing on the fields of botany and technology, he defines a transient time and the resulting urgency to rethink existing forms.

His sculptures and installations reveal the general instability and more or less failed attempt to unite humans and nature. This is clearly evident in Malte Taffner's work BIOSHELL CRX3, which is based on the failed Biosphere 2 experiment. With sincere fascination, Taffner tells us about the absurdity behind the human urge and belief that nature can be tamed, creating fictional spaces of a possible future. Plants in a suit made of aluminium and polycarbonate, which is connected to barrels with flexible hoses, are supplied with water in an environment isolated from the outside world. The suit can be seen here in its resting state at its filling station. The feeling of vulnerability continues to prevail here and is balanced by Malte Taffner's hope and goodwill in presenting alternative lifestyles. In this way, he conjures up hybrid forms that are both the shameful consequences of carelessness and the saving promise of revival.

text: Christopher Gerberding