#58: Vibeke Tandberg

Vibeke Tandberg‘s work is very much focusing on her own psycho-social relationship to the surrounding world. She uses photography – often digitally manipulated – and film to deal with subjects such as identity and aspects of gender, beauty and its stereotyped reproduction in culture, youthful dreams and ambitions or authority, repeatedly using herself as subject and model in the works.

Vibeke Tandberg presents the world premiere of:

Flymouth, 2014, 21:00 min
Flymouth is based on my fathers super 8 films from the sixties together with car crash test footage from the same period sourced from the internet. The script was written with this footage in mind and the result is a story about a woman and a man involved in a lethal car crash. The narrative is told in the past tense through the voices of actors Petronella Barker and Christian Greger Strøm. Time, events and memory collapse and are subject to unstable and arbitrary measures.

Mumble, 2014, 20:00 min
Mumble is based on selected footage from around twenty different feature films from different times, genres and techniques. The original footage is merged into an absurd totality driven primarily by movement, either of the camera or of the subject before the lense. The film is edited to work with the narration of a text bearing the same title, in where a voice is talking to itself revealing an internal struggle to locate its own body. Mumble was conceived as a 145 page long poem originally published with Onestar Press in Paris, 2011. The script for the film is an edited version of the poem. The voice belongs to actor Petronella Barker.

Both films aim to distort the notion of time and so twisting the relationship between time and events and between text and image. In Flymouth this becomes distinct in the repetitions that occur both in the narrative of the text along with the differences in the perception of temporality as it is revealed through the male and the female voices. The distortion of temporality is also obvious through the repeated use of the same footage causing the collapse of a linear narrative. Events are told and retold, images occur and reoccur, as if everything is happening at the same time. This applies also to the narrative structure in Mumble in which the use of repetition in the footage along with the monotonous voice reciting a minimalistic and repetitious text, creates an impression of something about to happen as if events are about to take place but which are in fact never beginning at all.

 

Vibeke Tandberg (b. 1967 in Oslo, Norway) lives and works in Berlin and Oslo. She studied at the College of Fine Arts in Bergen and at the School of Photography and Film at Göteburg University. Her work has been included in numerous international exhibitions.