A celebration of civilization

Seven Hills: Images and Signs of the 21st Century, an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin, running until 29 October.

The glowing globe, part of the exhibition's ‘Nucleus’ installation. Credit: STEPHANIE PILICK

This is not the usual apocalyptic vision of science, nor is it the didactic, self-consciously ‘entertaining’ public-understanding-of-science display to which the German public is usually subject. This grandiose exhibition in Berlin places science and technology alongside the other aspects of culture that define our civilization, in a distinctly intellectual and sophisticated juxtaposition.

The ‘Seven Hills’ of the exhibition, Berlin's millennium project, are thematic installations created by the authors of our civilization — artists and architects, as well as scientists — and displayed in a nineteenth-century building in east Berlin.

The themes are big and somewhat abstract: nucleus, jungle, cosmos, civilization, knowledge, faith, dream. The overall aim is also big and somewhat abstract, portraying the essence of our social evolution. Each installation is designed by a different architect and different teams of scientists. Ken Adam, the Berlin-born film architect best known for creating the style of James Bond films and Dr Strangelove, has made in the building's central atrium a cathedral whose windows are represented by a five-metre-diameter particle detector suspended below the atrium's glass dome and above a pyramid of displayed objects, many shown from their inside view. The main focus is a globe whose burning interior erupts through magma canals to the surface. Below the globe, robot dogs and the Japanese P3 humanoid — the world's most advanced robot — stalk the busy floor, around DNA sequencers and other high-tech hardware. Other displayed artefacts, for example the skull of philosopher René Descartes and the brain of the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, serve as reminders that these technical advances are but the products of the human mind, individually ephemeral but feeding the collective memory that is our civilization.

The message conveyed by the Jungle installation is that nature is no longer natural, but bends to the will of our culture, even in matters of conservation. The immense statue of Athena, on loan from the neighbouring Pergamon museum, stonily monitors visitors to the Knowledge installation, with its displays of the artefacts that have been used to record knowledge, from parchments to computers, and those representing the political and religious institutions that control knowledge and its acquisition.

The architectural design of the Faith installation is a huge sphere splintered into ever-smaller fragments symbolizing the fragmentation of religions during the history of civilization. The Dream installation, which deals with subjectivity, the preserve of both artists and neuroscientists, is housed in a theatrical set of rooms created by Japanese stage designer Kazuko Watanabe.

The work of artists from every century cuts through each installation. A huge seventeenth-century painting by Johann Melchior Roos, The Menagerie of Landgrave Carl von Hessen-Kassel, newly restored for the exhibition, opens the Jungle installation, which also displays sixteenth-century watercolours by naturalist Giorgio Liberale, and the shocking works of the contemporary artists Jan Fabre, who makes sculptures from beetles, and Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, whose drawings record the anatomical deformations of bugs collected from around nuclear power plants.

Most of the installations feature hands-on tricks. In Jungle, one can interact with a sculpture of the Indian goddess Kali, viewing fantastic worlds literally through her eyes; in Space one can walk through a revolving tunnel that conveys a feeling of weightlessness.

But the exhibition is not play. Nor does it attempt to aestheticize science. Rather it integrates science into a complete aesthetic representation of civilization. The whole is also an optimistic statement about Berlin, which seeks to integrate its torn twentieth-century history into world civilization, the metaphoric Seven Hills, and into a positive future. This optimism is also represented by the participation of Ken Adam, a Jew forced out of Berlin during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Those Berliners rooted more prosaically in the present see not the optimism, but the DM28 million price tag presented to the reunified, but bankrupt, city.