9 November 2018 8 pm

A performance with and by Mårten Spångberg and a film by James Benning

Digital Technology is a meditation in the company of objects, a stream of impressions that comes to an end and there we are - it’s nothing special but a little like talking about a book that we all read but really long ago and remember different things. Now they are played again, in front of us but more inside like a quite slow film. A film - like the piece - that’s there more like the television left on without sound.

Digital Technology was first presented in 2016 as an attempt to listen to and be guided by the time embedded in a seemingly random series of objects. Yet, objects that resonate with space and that pass on rhythm and activation to form a landscape. A landscape that undermines the well rehearsed wish for perspective and all what that means, in favour of a horizon or perhaps a place where neither questions nor answers makes much or any sense. Perspectives have a tendency to measure and judge, make decisions for others and introduce forms of power. In respect of horizon instead everything is equally and indifferent. It is perhaps in this moment when indifference appears that we learn to see or listen.

For june Mårten Spångberg has created a slightly shortened version of Digital Technology that shift the space, due to circumstances, into a vertical preference. It is the first time that the work is presented in the context of visual art which, emphasized by the wall space will shift forms of signification. Mårten Spångberg takes a special interest in the oscillation of shifted performativities where activities, bodies and objects take on different capacities of representation and blurs identity. Those spaces – ambiguous without being unsafe, he proposes, are spaces that can generate agency on the terms of each individual yet circumvent identity and value. At the end this is one of the most central nodes in Mårten Spångberg’s work, and implicitly its political forte, the experience of oneself experiencing.

Mårten Spångberg is a Swedish choreographer living and working in Berlin. Although he identifies as a choreographer his work is not media dependent but span from dance to architecture and painting, next to a strong writing practice, in particular theory. Initially a strong contributor to conceptual choreography his more recent works takes on a more experiential form, especially in large format dance performances such as “Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le theatre”, “Natten” and “La Substance, but in English”. His work has been presented in among other places MoMA PS1, Palais de Tokyo, Renaissance Society, Tate Liverpool, Hordaland Kunstcenter, Tallinn Art Hall, Tensta Konsthall, Moderna Museet, Manchester Festival, ICA London, CA2M Madrid, MAMBO, Nasjonalgalleriet Oslo, MUMOK Vienna.