'silicon based creatures'

With his series “Silicon-Based Creatures,” Wolfgang Bohusch invites the viewer to stand before his photographs, meditate, and allow the mind to drift into the subconscious. Each work tells a different story — your own story. There are no titles, no interpretive hints, and no prescribed ways of looking. As in a Rorschach test, Bohusch encourages you to form your own associations and recognize patterns that are not pre-given, rendering every photograph a distinctly individual experience.

A millisecond is the timespan in which Bohusch’s sculptures come into being, yet the artist grants us the time to contemplate these millisecond formations calmly. The “Silicon-Based Creatures” series — comprising 21 photographs — emerged from his weeks spent in the Sahara Desert, where he experimented with elements such as sand, wind, light, and chance. What we see in the images is a fusion of forces that serendipitously coalesce into sculptural forms and are then captured on film. The underlying process resembles the behavioral patterns of bird or fish swarms: when we observe them moving together in the sky or water, our minds instinctively impose recognizable shapes onto fleeting configurations. The moment we identify one image within the swarm, it has already dissolved. Still, we are given the space to slowly construct our own interpretations and perhaps locate a fragment of ourselves within them.

So, once you have “invented” your creatures, where do they originate? And what might they be communicating? If we consider them as signs — and allow for a hint of superstition — could they point toward the future? Like symbols in popular divination or shamanic ritual, Bohusch’s creatures might be read as prophetic figures. Alternatively, do they emerge from the past as mythical beings?

In this series, Bohusch confronts us with a spectrum of themes and questions that he neither fully resolves nor claims to answer. He leaves us with one final clue that introduces a broader existential problem: silicone — a constituent of sand — is also the material foundation of microelectronics, including computer chips, and thus underpins the very technologies used to produce these photographs. This connection ultimately raises what might be called the fundamental question: what came first?

Julia Hartmann