The Dance Machines – From Léger to Kraftwerk exhibition to open at Moderna Museet in January will go farther than just a simple art exhibition. The 3D experience will be a combination of music, art, and basically magic. To kick-start the exhibition, Kraftwerk will be in Stockholm to hold four concerts at Cirkus from Jan 21 to Jan 23, with two shows on the final day.

The starting point of the exhibition is the fascination for the machine, all things industrial and the mechanics in everyday life, and curator Jo Widoff mentions the fact that Kraftwerk have been examining the relationship between man and machine for more than four decades.

Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter is personally involved in the Stockholm exhibition. “It feels good being part of the machine. It’s a liberating feeling. First of all since I as an individual get to stand back – we play the machines and the machines play us,” he says.

During the first decades of the 20th century the mechanized society had a breakthrough in everyday life as well as in art. In an era of mass production where the assembly line was introduced at factories, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Gösta Adrian-Nilsson portrayed bodies reduced to mechanical objects. Thhis exhibition consists of these type of works by Picabia, Giacomo Balla, Alexandra Ekster, Viking Eggeling and Fernand Léger plus Kraftwerk’s 3-D installation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

Words by Angela Markovic

Kraftwerk will be at Cirkus between Jan 21–23 (with two shows on Jan 23)
Dance Machines – From Léger to Kraftwerk will be on display at Moderna Museet from Jan 22 to April 27.