Martijn Tellinga (The Netherlands, 1974) is an artist, composer and occasional performer. His practice occupies an intermedium between music composition, spatial installation and durational performance. Drawn from a reduced formalist-seeming vocabulary, his works pose reflections on the mechanisms and extent of compositional form —often inquiring into modes of repetition, seriality and patterning—, and the musical agency of an evolving materiality and contextuality. They are commonly produced by means of some self-evolving system, a processual organisation, open-ended durational re-arrangement or site-specific dynamics, which in turn are aimed to work as a perceptual, performative and social medium. Much of his work is score-based and includes a wide variety of conceptual actions and chance operations, probing the emergent field between intended and accidental occurrences.
The spatial, performance and intervention-type works he produced in recent years, have increasingly aligned his output with emerging propositions for an expanded, post-media music practice. His current activities focus on how to read principles of musical structure, temporality and process to approach the multifaceted construct of installation, rendering musical work which activates site-adaptive movement and performative action, moving image and registrative techniques, text, and the architectural setting. Through such speculative musical spaces, an extended musicality is proposed: how can musical ideas travel between and convey through different mediums and situations, and function as a generative and experiential devise beyond sound and the concert setting? With his research ‘Expanded Composition, Extended Musicality: An Inquiry into Musically Driven Installation Practice’, he is a funded Fiosraigh PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media in Dublin, Ireland.
He received a Master’s degree in Sonology and multiple Stipends for Established Artists from the Mondriaan Fund. He presents worldwide, lectures and works in residence. He has articulated his artistic research through the development of courses around the spatial, processual and environmental modalities of sound informed practices. This led to visiting professorships at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and ArtEZ Academy in Arnhem, and intensive courses at the Modern Academy in Hong Kong and Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City.
He is one of the curator producers of the long running series DNK Amsterdam. With DNK Ensemble he interprets and re-enacts seminal pieces on the edge of experimental music, performance art and installation, from the likes of Antoine Beuger, Cornelius Cardew, David Dunn, Dick Raaijmakers, Anthony McCall, David Tudor.
He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
