There is a lot to discover in the deep shades of black in the photographs of Mårten Lange, from which cityscapes emerge. During a residency in China during the winter of 2018, Lange took photographs in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chongqing. The heavy blanket of smog disguises these cities in a haze that occasionally conceals whether Lange has taken his photos by day or by night. Many of his pictures give you that typical feeling that your eyes have to get used to the dark, but the photograph only reveals what its print allows. It is for that reason that Lange would have been at the right place with the Benrido Atelier to experiment with the subtleties of darkness. A haunting feeling lies in his work, of places in which time has accelerated. These megalopolises seem to anticipate the future while losing their historical foundations in the process. The past becomes invisible in the shadows of the skyscrapers; and it is precisely that which gets lost out of sight in that blending force of anonymizing globalization that Mårten Lange records. I hope that my choice to highlight this body of work (which is still in progress) will be taken as an encouragement by the artist to find his way to the Benrido Atelier.

– Mirjam Kooiman Juror, Hariban Award 2019

Artist Statement

Ghosts is a project I worked on while participating in an artist residency in Shanghai in the winter of 2018. It’s a view on modern China, through architecture, technology and the urban environment. It was my first visit to the country and I was struck by the breakneck speed of economic development and the appetite for risk. I also encountered a completely new kind of light, with the winter sun filtered through the heavy smog, and the LED arrays of the buildings setting everything aglow at night. China has a rich tradition of ghost stories and myths, even though the communist party has tried to suppress folk superstitions for decades. I wanted to connect my pictures of hyper-modern urban environments with these old beliefs, by using the light and atmospheric effects to create photographs with a spectral quality. I also think, in a metaphorical sense, that there are many ghosts being created when a place goes through such rapid change. There is no time to say a proper farewell to the past, and so it’s left to haunt the people as they move into the future. The country has sacrificed a lot to be able to move at this incredible speed, and there is a certain pain reflected in the architecture, I think. These images are hard to print in a satisfactory way with an inkjet printer due to their wide range of soft, dark tones. Should I be accepted for the Hariban award, I’d look forward to seeing how the quality of the collotype oil on the Japanese papers can bring out texture and tactility in my images. After having seen some Benrido prints at art fairs I’d be delighted to see how the process could enhance my images. I see many possibilities.

Bio

Mårten Lange (born 1984, Gothenburg, Sweden) is an artist working on a wide range of topics, among them, nature, technology and the urban environment. He has published several books, including Citizen (Études Books, 2015), Another Language (MACK, 2012), The Mechanism (MACK 2017) and Chicxulub (self-published, 2016). Lange studied photography in Sweden, Japan and the United Kingdom. His work has been shown internationally, most recently at Foam in Amsterdam, Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.