At the core of Simon Denny’s show “Disruptive Berlin” at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, are a series of sculptural works that respond to the city’s newfound identity as a hub for emergent technology companies. Works such as Berlin Startup Case Mod: Sociomantic (2014) and Berlin Startup Case Mod: EyeEm(2014) appear as an assemblage of emblazoned computer hardware, accessorized with USB sticks and printed fascias. In these and in other works, flatscreens become shelves and computer packaging materials become plinths; the technology here seems to fold into its own promotional rhetoric and an overcooked sense of its own futurity. Denny describes the work as a series of subjective portraits of specific hot-tipped startup companies and specialist events such as TechCrunch, and Hy! Berlin, aimed at accelerating new business investment for startups in the city. Together, the sculptures in “Disruptive Berlin” presents a noisy scene of competing forces, all pitching their own pre-loaded zeitgeist of a tech-modulated world soon to come. This sense of zeitgeist is also retro-activated through works in the exhibition such as Disruptive Legacy Model: Apple IIe (2014) that utilize older technologies (an early model of an Apple home computer), and others such as the Axel Springer Unternehmensarchiv investment kiosk (2014) that draw on specific narratives of commercial breakthroughs that have consequently shaped the cultural interface of computer technology in recent years. (Matt Packer)

Simon Denny’s exhibition “Disruptive Berlin” at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, runs through March 15.