In ‹The Location of Truth›, Mårten Spångberg asks whether art must get its hands dirty with truth again. After the late 1960s dismantled art’s claims to essence, what happens when truth itself has lost credibility? Rather than restoring modernist certainties, the lecture distinguishes facts from truth and considers art’s capacity to evoke what it cannot possess. Drawing on Mario Perniola’s impersonal feeling and Deleuze’s pre-individual, Spångberg proposes the aesthetic encounter as a rupture: not the harmonious recognition of beauty, but the unsettling force of the sublime. Truth emerges as contingent, unstable and anonymous. The encounter cannot not be imperceptible, yet its impact is real: something happens without becoming an object of knowledge, and the subject is no longer quite the same.

Interpretation: Kim Shinu

Mårten Spångberg is a Swedish choreographer, writer and curator living in Berlin. For more than three decades, his work has explored choreography as an expanded artistic practice across dance, performance, writing and visual art. His recent work engages ecology, sensation and the politics of aesthetics, questioning Western art’s entanglement with extractivist capitalism while exploring how art might generate experiences beyond identity, representation and meaning.