About David Bergé
The series on this website are designed to be perceived through the internet. Other aspects of my work, that are more site specific, ephemeral or sculpturally oriented, are not represented here.
David Bergé (BE, °1983) is an artist working on the intersection of photography, performance, choreography with an awareness of the urban. His artistic practice consists of performative walk projects, performance installations, photographic projections integrated in choreographies and photographic installations. His work has been seen at and produced by TanzQuartier Wien (Vienna), WorkSpace Brussels (Brussels), Netwerk (Aalst, BE), PRISMA (Mexico-City), SALT (Istanbul) and Goethe Institution (New Delhi). Artistic collaborations include projects with (amongst others) choreographers DD Dorvillier (US), Trajal Harrell (US), Marc Vanrunxt (BE) and lightening designer Jan Maertens (BE).
PROFESSIONAL TOURISM is an ongoing project that is a consequence of the nomadic mode of life I enhanced since september 2010, when I gave up my studio and flat. I only move to the next place when there is a concrete project or professional context. As soon as I arrive in a place, I get as local as possible. When there is no project, I stay in the environment I previously worked in. The project’s 10 stages reflect on the notions of visiting places and the economics in the field of contemporary art production.
Elizabeth Waterhouse on PROFESSIONAL TOURISM stage #4:
Reflecting his extensive collaborations with choreographers from the field of contemporary dance, photographer David Bergé’s solo work is marked by an attentiveness to movement—an awareness of how stilled photographic frames trace dynamics and spark the active process of understanding what we see. The series Professional Tourism stage #4 is both a study of urban reality, and an investigation of the compositional relationship between image center and periphery. Like the visitor orienting within unfamiliar territory, these images of landscapes present views that ignite the intensity of active, quizzical looking.
Dynamisms surface in the formal level of spatial composition, in which a tension exists between the simple, empty center and the complex, discordant periphery. Lacking a visual anchor, the photos refute the basic logic of engagement and signification based upon a center—logics of cohesion, balance, and political or aesthetic unity. Instead engagement is multiplied. Destabilized, the viewer may initially search or scan the landscape. In this mode, the picture becomes a static object of active looking, the eyes palpating for some semblance of whole or meaning. Alternatively, or after a period of orientation, the viewer may dissolve into the empty center and engage with the margins through peripheral vision. The later supports a different connection with the work, a meeting or even a portal where the landscape comes to you and representational content surfaces more internally as resonances. Space is activated, both within the frame of the photograph, and within the intermediary space between the viewer and what is seen.
Each image is also intensely multi-durational. Bergé’s photographs reveal found situations featuring materials with disjoint timescales and action potentials. Inhabitants figure less prominently than habitat. The rhythms of organic matter—of people, nature, and animals—speak within and against the durations of manmade constructions. Intensities animate this assembly: the interval of a red stoplight, closed doors awaiting animation, a bench offering the possibility to sit, the car about to drive by, the shifting light of passing clouds, the lightness of a fresh dusting of snow, the quasi-permanence of cement, the timing of construction and renovation, sequential layers of paint, and an urban palm tree with dry dying branches. While the bustle of many contemporary cities is absent, the images still expose kinetic potential—the force of urban spaces, even in placid regimes and quiet moments.
Andros Zins-Browne on NOTED APPEARANCE:
NOTED APPEARANCE of David Bergé and Kajsa Sandström begins with a situation reminiscent of Antonioni's Blow Up. Photographer and subject, male gaze and female object of the gaze, artistic muse and the trope of seduction as artistic inspiration. But quickly, Bergé and Sandström explode these distinctions. The role of photographer and subject switches and eventually multiplies- across a series of surfaces, time durations, chronology and actors (audience included).
The camera, we discover is not a prop of this performance as much as it is a means through which to understand the act of looking. The act of looking, like the act of photographing is active, it involves choosing and framing, composing what it is that one is looking at, but perhaps more importantly the performance offers us the experience that looking is also an act of projection.
As an austere but elegant set and lighting design play with the possible dynamics of light and image projection, reflection, refraction, still versus moving images, still images that move and moving bodies which remain still- the act of looking from it initial proposition in the beginning of the performance becomes delightfully complicated.
The audience- sitting and standing around the space all become projectors as well as projection surfaces, objects of the performers' gaze as well as spectators whose attention is continually being redirected in space and through various media. A photograph can no longer be considered an image, nor even the capturing of the moment of a particular situation, but rather as a point in a set of relations whose interplay is always a surplus that goes beyond the frame- potentially as complex and multi-dimensional as what we see on stage here, or as simple as a good conversation.
"how can you be a professional tourist in istanbul?", video document of talk and walk at SALT, istanbul, oct 2011
NOTED APPEARANCE 5 minute clip, 2009
Jack Hauser on VIENNA FOOTNOTES, 2010