Definitions and Facts by Malin Elgán at Moderna Museet, 2015. Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet

Malin Elgán

A Choreographic work

14.6 2015 – 23.8 2015

Stockholm

Malin Elgán’s performance Definitions and Facts is for the first time shown as finished work in conjunction with the exhibition After Babel. With the dancers Polina Akhmetzyanova and Pär Andersson, Elgán has created a piece that is based on previous research materials and the temporal aspects of dance.

Definitions and Facts deals with the relationship or non-relationship between choreography and documentation in order to discuss issues of perception. Through the steps, the dancers operate in time and thereby problematize the dancing’s visibility and its relation to the exhibition space. The project reuses documentation and research materials from a previous process.

The work on Definitions and Facts started in the spring of 2013, when Elgán had an artistic residency in New York at the dance organization Movement Research. During her stay, Elgán collaborated with the American dancer Sarah Beth Percival, resulting in a showing at the legendary event scene Judson Church in New York. The process then continued in Stockholm during the autumn of 2014 and the finished work is the one that now appears in the exhibition After Babel.

About Malin Elgan

Malin Elgán’s artistic work contains a specific and simultaneously diverse and expanded choreographic practice. Her work consists of different media, subjects, movements and shapes; such as the radio program Talk a bit, then we’ll check, 2012, wooden objects and orchestras movements in The wood piece, 2011 or nature documentaries and folk dances in Storyboard, 2009 and Form said: do, 2007. Elgán does not allow dance to be confined to certain movements and places but instead places it in new contexts to enable more meanings and readings.

Malin Elgán is a choreographer based in Stockholm and is active both in Sweden and internationally. In 2013, her choreographic practice was awarded the Birgit Cullberg grant. She has also been the guest editor for a special edition of the art magazine Paletten, which was temporarily renamed Baletten. She began her career as an assistant to the multifaceted artist Jan Fabre in Belgium in 2002. Her most recent work was the dance performance and castanet concert På spel, which was performed at Dansens Hus in Stockholm in February 2015.

Dancers: Polina Akhmetzyanova and Pär Andersson
Sound: Sophie Helsing | Costume: Cornelia Blom

With support from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Ccap.