BIOGRAPHY
Vibeke Tandberg was born in Oslo, Norway, 1967. Lives in Oslo & Berlin
2008 Klosterfelde, Berlin & Gallery c/o, Berlin;
Dekonstruktionen, Hamburger Banhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin;
Reality Check, Contemporary Art from the mid-90s to the present, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
2007 La parola nell´arte/ The word in art, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy
2005 Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany
2004 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo
Selected Bibliography UTNE, Janeke Meyer,
Vibeke Tandberg, Lillehammer, Lillehammer Kunstmuseum/ Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, 2007; UELAND, Hanne Beate,
Vibeke Tandberg, Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004; BANG-LARSEN, Lars & NESBITT, Rebecca Gordon,
Vibeke Tandberg, c/o, Berlin, Atle Gerhardsen, 2003.
INTERVIEW
Ivo Mesquita: The appropriation of books by visual artists seems to be a current strategy among a few artists in different latitudes around the world. What does this strategy mean in the framework of your own artistic practice and production?
Vibeke Tandberg: My work always has a very personal point of departure. Everything I do comes from my own psychological and social relationship to my surroundings. In the case of this particular work I wouldn’t say it is a strategy as I have done very few text-based works, and because I would not have done it if it wasn’t for the existential content of the novel and the situation I was in at the time I worked with it. The concept is subordinate to the meaning of the work. But the way of working with this book, deconstructing it physically, is a method I often tend to use. Deconstruction works for me as a way to figure out the world.
Ivo Mesquita: Why
L’Etranger [The Stranger], by Albert Camus, a fundamental existentialist novel from 1942? I am very fond of this book. I read it when I was seventeen, and I recall how it impressed me and my contemporaries in the late 1960s. It has changed my way of thinking about life and living, forever. Is there any particular meaning for you?
Vibeke Tandberg: It definitely had the same impact on me. From seventeen and a long way into my twenties, I was totally into Sartre and Camus. French existentialism had a great resonance in me, and I think in teenagers generally. To feed this young curiosity with Sartre and Camus, who leave you without any answers really but make your questions important, gives you an alternative to religion or any other fundamental platforms in life. It was very important for me because it made me think about my own existence in a way that made it a challenge to live without life having a higher purpose. It also nurtured this way of thinking to reread it again after twenty years of trying to fill my life with various meaningful activities. Reading it again sort of clarified the reasons for all the choices I have made since that initial reading.
Ivo Mesquita: What interests you in deconstructing the book, reducing it to a sort of ground zero of a narrative?
Vibeke Tandberg: The novel is a description of a man living his life totally alienated to his surroundings. This doesn’t bother him though, even when faced with death he relates to that as a circumstance not affecting him personally. He simply refuses to interpret his own existence. This leaves him indifferent to the things happening to him. His lack of emotions costs him his life in the end because society can’t accept his seemingly demoralized attitude. I think of this novel as a very meaningful view on the total lack of meaning of human existence. I wanted to take these 32,000-something words that make up this view on the challenge of living and reduce them to a pattern that means nothing. Just leaving the singular words as small decorative objects. The pattern again is based on the alphabet which is a system made to organize and to make meaning, but in alphabetizing the text it deorganizes the content and takes away the original meaning so it becomes paradoxical. It is also important for me that the work was extremely time consuming, that the deconstruction of these existential thoughts took a long time. It was as if digesting the book became a physical experience which I think has an analogy in life; how we fill our existence with meaning is very often by physical challenges, pleasures, refusals or endeavors.
Ivo Mesquita is the curator of the 28th Bienal de São Paulo and chief-curator of the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo, where he lives and works.
Projects with updated content