OSLO.- Consisting of eight life-sized plaster sculptures cast from her own torso and six photographs of clouds that were made by a fog machine, this exhibition of Vibeke Tandberg’s new work is shockingly simple and minimal.
In the thirty-three years since Brud (1993), the series of wedding announcements and photos that was her first major project, Tandberg’s work has evolved through a mysterious, consistent accretion of images, thoughts, props and experience. Across her body of work these elements appear and dissolve, combine and resurface as she pursues each constellation of thought to its limits. Tandberg’s artistic process is similar to the formation of clouds, changing their shape as water becomes vapor, cools and condenses.
As Tandberg details in her 2024 novel Hestedagboken (The Horse Diary), the principal new works in the ongoing survey exhibition at Kode began on New Year’s Eve 2021 when she bought a nearly hundred-year-old stuffed horse from a farm outside of Oslo. For the next four months, she and her studio assistants produced plaster casts from nearly every part of the dead horse’s body. These casts are assembled at Kode as Horse Archive (2023), a ghostly display of plaster shapes ranging from the horse’s noble and classical head, to the less recognizable and strangely vulnerable curved contours of its flanks. There is a strong undertow of sadness and pain to this assortment of body parts coolly arranged on large metal racks.
Is the horse becoming human in Horse Archive, or is Tandberg allying herself with the horse in the eight sculptures cast from her own body for this exhibition?
The plaster forms of Torso 1-8 (2026) exhibited here are inconsistent in texture, density, shape and they are frayed at the edges. The body depicted is far from classical sculptural forms of the human body. They are more like topographical maps: cool impressions of flesh rising in folds and collapsing in deep, concave hollows.
In these eight frontally facing sculptures, two small breasts are unevenly splayed on the upper sides of the cast. In place of a belly, two buttock-like shapes protrude from two upper thighs. Tandberg’s eight torsos evoke the beeswax sculptures of human organs and limbs that the American artist Kiki Smith made in the atmosphere of the AIDS crisis during the late 1980s and 90s. But looking closer, there is none of the pathos Smith brings to those works. Tandberg’s approach is more clinical, factual. These sculptures are more like the woman-suits made from flayed human skin that loomed terrifyingly in the movie Silence of the Lambs.
As Tandberg worked on the horse body casts in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. “It was as if all the devastation in the world merged with the sculptures in the studio,” she told me. Resurrecting one of her most famous props, the Old Man mask that appeared for the first time in the 2003 photo series Old Man Walking Up and Down a Staircase, she began shooting what would become the 2023 Old Man Cowboy series of photos. Wearing the mask, she sat on the horse dressed as a cowboy while an out-of-frame smoke machine produced a constantly shifting cloud of mysterious vapors. She shot 23,000 frames. While she was editing them, Israel invaded Gaza and Tandberg was gripped by a sense that the American cowboy story was not just a kitsch and humorous trope, it was a tragedy.
She decided to import the mask and the smoke, the horse and the cowboy in her 2023 film Post Americana, a beautiful elegiac work that evokes the collapse of colonial dreams of infinite conquest. As the writer and critic Susanne Christensen wrote in her review of the They Live exhibition, “[Tandberg’s] commitment is even clearer now, when her oeuvre has seen a gradual movement from a politics centered on the body to a more pronounced interest in geopolitical questions. Post Americana is a meditation on a cowboy being shot in slow motion and falling dead into a pile of hay to the strains of elegiac choral music. All sorts of meanings are set in motion …”
Seen in the context of these preceding projects, Bodies and Clouds feels like a line of flight from a surfeit of meaning. Working on these sculptures and photographs, the artist considered the explosions of supernovas that occurred billions of years ago and brought our planet into existence. Where is the link between earthly, corporal life and the cosmos that spawned it?
Bodies and clouds, vapor and flesh, a return to the elemental.
Vibeke Tandberg lives and works in Oslo. Her artistic practice encompasses a multitude of disciplines, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, and literature. While her early production takes the vantage point of staged and manipulated self-portraits, her practice has been increasingly directed toward a restless testing of opportunities within the arts. By using a wider variety of media and techniques, her work can be described as an investigation of how the world shapes itself and how to shape the world. Ideas and works are deconstructed and reconstructed. Creating becomes violence, alteration, conversion, and dissolution. Tandberg emphasises that the subject is an unstable point of venture, meaning is shifted all the time, and artistic freedom is without expectations.
Tandberg has an MFA from the Department of Film and Photography, Göteborgs Universitet, and a BFA from the Department of Photography, Kunsthøgskolen in Bergen. She has held residencies at Bethanien in Berlin and ISCP in New York. She has exhibited extensively nationally and abroad since the mid 1990’s and has had numerous solo exhibitions, among others, at Norrköping Art Museum, Haugar Kunstmuseum in Tønsberg, Centro per l’ Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. Tandberg has been part of group exhibitions at National Gallery of Art in Washington, Moderna Museet in Malmø and Stockholm, Kunsthalle Bonn, 28th Biennale in Sao Paulo and the Sydney Biennale. Her work is represented in several public and private collections, including Musée d’ Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Kode (Bergen), Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Collection (New York). She was the winner of the Lorck Schive Art Prize in 2017, and in 2019, she made her debut as a playwright for the play Hunder (Dogs) at the National Theatre in Oslo. Tandberg has published six novels and a collection of essays on Forlaget Oktober, all closely related to her artistic practice. Her latest novel Radikal (Radical) was published in spring 2026. Tandberg is currently presenting They Live, her most comprehensive exhibition to date, at Kode Art Museum in Bergen, Norway.
Chris Kraus is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles. After studying acting, she spent almost two decades creating performances and experimental films in New York before turning to writing. Her novels include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has also published three books of cultural criticism–Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television, while her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and served as Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College from 2020 to 2024. She has contributed to numerous magazines and has co-edited Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work, translated into seventeen languages, has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed.
