The Order of Chaos – Die Ordnung des Chaos

In the exhibition The Order of Chaos – Die Ordnung des Chaos by German-American artist Stefan Roloff  (born 1953 in Berlin) shows three projects. Stefan Roloff is a painter, video artist and pioneer of digital image processing in the fields of video art, music videos and photography. In 1984 he was invited by the New York Institute of Technology and the musician Peter Gabriel to work on Images II, the first prototype of computer-controlled image processing. With The Face, he developed the precursor to the music video for Peter Gabriel’s song Sledgehammer. At the same time, he produced Big Fire, one of the first digital images created by an artist, set to music by Andrew Cyrille. Stefan Roloff has created a large number of short films and documentaries, characterized by a focused look beneath the surface. His documentary Die Rote Kapelle (The Red Orchestra) based on interviews with eyewitnesses, has been on display in the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since 2015. His first novel, entitled Durchbrenner, will be published by Rowohlt Berlin in October 2026.

On display at Schloss Biesdorf is the series Of Mice and Monuments (2023–25). Roloff developed its concept in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent destruction of statues from the socialist world. In this colorful series of inkjet prints, mice erect monuments to themselves, admire them or destroy them.

Two further installations on view in the exhibition are realized as three-dimensional paintings: Burnt Mickey (2026) depicts subservient behavior in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world. Saturn Eats His Children (2026) is a Hieronymus Bosch-like scene in iridescent colors, which allows us to experience the eternal cycle of freedom and oppression like a dance on a powder keg.

Stefan Roloff lives and works in Berlin and New York.