Torben Sangild

Works With Live Art Denmark
2010 Live review at Samtalekøkken
2014 Discussion of his review of “Live art for børn 1”
2016 “Hot Potato”, collaboration with David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo for COLAB Copenhagen

Live Review of “Undgåelsens Bevægelighed”
“Undgåelsens Bevægelighed” was an installation in public space by the Danish performance duo CoreAct, Anika K. Barkan and Helene Kvint. The title translates roughly to “Agility of Avoidance” but the work was shwon as “Reflection” for international audiences. In Copenhagen, the installation that consisted of a small house made of pieces of colored glass, was presented next to the Black Diamond, the extension of the Royal Library. In October 2010, we challenged Torben to get up on stage and review the piece in the first one of our series of live reviews that became an central part of our performance art series Samtalekøkken. His performative review, which lead to interesting discussions of, among other things, what a title can and should do, can be seen and heard in Danish in the video below.

Discussion of Torben’s Review of “Live art for børn 1”
At our first children’s festival,  Live Art for Børn 1, Torben reviewed some performances for the renowned Danish daily Politikken. His article (in Danish) can be found here. In it, Torben criticises a performance by Portuguese performer Marcio Carvalho we presented. He wrote that Marcio’s work, which dealt with issues of war, pop culture and advertising, had crossed his and his daughter’s boundaries. In particular he opposed the use of scenes from an old computer game in which people were shot. Parents should have the opportunity to choose, he argued, if and how to present this kind of material to their children. The review, albeit more than critical, spawned a lot of productive discussion. Therefore we continued the debate with him on several occasions. We talked to Torben on a Radioshow on 24syv and on other occassions and finally invited him to explain his views during our symposium at the second Live Art for Børn festival at Kunstmuseum Arken in 2015.

Photo: Peter Lind

Hot Potato
Torben was one of the Danish collaborators we invited to “Colab Copenhagen”, a format for performance and discussion that paired African artists with representatives of Danish institutions. The pairs discussed who has agency about historical narrations of colonized territories. Torben teamed up with our own David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo. Together they reflected issues of (post-)colonialism in the performance “Hot Potato”. It can be seen in the beginning of the video below, minutes 0:00 to 7:10.

About the Artist
Torben is a cultural researcher, reviewer, author and radio host. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy and modern culture and a PhD in modern culture from the Department of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he worked as a researcher and teacher from 1997 to 2013. He published the books “The Aesthetics of Noise” and “Objective Sensitivity – on Emotions, Sensation and Objectivity in Recent Art and Music”. In 2010, Torben was behind the launch of Kunstdebatten.dk, a website for the debate of Danish contemporary art, and in 2014 he began working as a radio host on Radio24syv, where he hosted a program called “Wiki-værkstedet”. As a writer, he published in Politiken, Kunsten.nu and since 2016 as a regular writer for the online newspaper Zetland. Torben is a member of the Danish branch of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA).

We can’t find a personal website, but here is his entry in the Danish Wikipedia.