For the 2021 edition of CHART Art Fair, OSL contemporary is proud to present a solo booth by Vibeke Tandberg.
The presentation will explore Tandberg’s continuous relationship with and use of an old man mask. First introduced in the 2003 work, Old Man Walking Up and Down a Staircase, the film sees Tandberg heavily pregnant with twin boys, wearing the mask and dressed in her grandfather’s old suit. Transforming from a woman at the peak of fertility and femininity, the mask was an exploration of the pregnant body. The mask reappears in several later works in which Tandberg seems to be engaging in everything from playful masquerade to investigations of the portrait as genre.
Tandberg's practice changed after 2008. She moved away from expensive productions to a less expensive practice based on recycling her own works. Inspired by literature, her focus shifted to a more existential consideration of the subject. She devoted more time to writing and debuted as a novelist in 2012 with the novel Beijing Duck and has since published Tempelhof (2014), Joelle Joelle (2016) and Eurydike Anal (2018). In 2019 came the essay collection Uvilje, and in 2020 she made her debut as a playwright with the play Hunder at the National Theater. Feber (Fever) is Vibeke Tandberg's fifth novel.
The presentation at CHART Art Fair includes a series of nine framed photographs, a bronze sculpture and a pallet of newspapers.
In Old Man # 1-9 (2019-2021) Tandberg returns to photography, but also continues the recycling of her own works and ideas, and she once again revisits the mask. She mixes analogue and digital techniques to create morphed versions of the mask and her own face. The mask and Tandberg's own facial features become new faces and new expressions in this classic portrait series.
Together with the series of framed photographs the presentation contains a pallet of newspapers, where Tandberg has printed self-portraits from a photo booth, amounting to more than eighty-eight pages. Classical portrait postures, profiles, selfies; self-depictions that are both beautiful and ugly; and at times abstract studies of the form of her own head and physiognomy spread out page by page in what looks like the world’s thickest tabloid paper.
At the centre of the presentation is a plinth with a bronze cast of the original mask, tying together the presentations with a nod to future and past practices.
Other events:
In addition to the presentation at the booth, Old Man Walking Up and Down a Staircase, will be screened as part of the fair’s cinema program. Saturday 28 August Tandberg will take part in an artist talk together with Lars Bang Larsen, 12.00 at teh fair venue The Cinema. Her collection of essays titled Uvilje and her latest novel, Feber, will be available at the CHART Book Fair.
The exhibition, also named Feber, is currently on view at OSL contemporary in Oslo, and Tandberg has curated the show Verket og Gesten featuring Ceal Floyer, Matias Faldbakken and Jacqueline Landvik at Gallery Melk in Oslo.
25 September sees the premiere of her latest film, Old Man Dancing, where she has collaborated with world-renowned ballerina, Maria Kotchetkova. The film premiere coincides with a live performance at the Astrup Fearnley Musuem, and the event is a collaboration between the museum and The Norwegian Opera & Ballet. The film will also premiere on the opera’s digital platform, allowing for an international audience to take part in the event.
The participation is kindly supported by OCA, Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
