MELK is proud to present Mårten Lange with Another Language.

“A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view. It marks the limit, but does not pass it.”

Alexander von Humboldt (1845)

In Another Language Mårten Lange examines the natural world and the sciences surrounded by it. By capturing flora, animals, and natural phenomena he creates a visual enigmatic and intimate world where the subjects are distanced from their environments; they appear as sculptures in frozen photographic moments.

The aesthetics of science and the materiality of the depicted objects are constantly emphasized and explored in Lange’s black-and-white images, which result in an ambiguous and unreal index of nature. In Another Language, Lange reiterates photography as documenting and voyeuristic means, while he lingers upon how the visual image can capture shapes, patterns and texture. The world we are entering, the objects we are viewing, and the other language the photographs read, bring us to a secret and mythical world. The idea of ‘other language’ is thus two folded; nature and its laws can be seen as one language, while the idea of photography as a language and system is underlined throughout the project.

Mårten Lange was born in 1984 in Mölndal, Sweden. He received a BFA in photography at University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his MFA in photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, U.K. He has published six books, including Machina (2007), Anomalies (2009) and Another Language (2012). He has recently exhibited at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin and at Ampersand, Portland, USA.

The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council Norway.