Vibeke Tandberg

Vibeke Tandberg (b. 1967) is among the leading representatives of postmodern conceptual photography. They Live marks a homecoming for the artist, who studied photography at the Art Academy in Bergen in the early 1990s.

As a central part of the Nordic wave of young artists emerging in the 1990s, Tandberg is particularly known for her groundbreaking staged photography and is regarded as a pioneer of digital photography as an art form.

The exhibition will present highlights from three decades of Tandberg’s practice alongside new works on display for the first time.

They Live will combine the theatricality of her oeuvre with a stagecraft of its own: works in multiple media – photography, film and video, sculpture and objects, text pieces and ephemera – will be presented throughout Kode’s Stenersen building.

The exhibition will highlight the breadth of Tandberg’s practice, which has left a profound mark on Norwegian – and international – art history, while also demonstrating how her work retains its relevance for new generations in reflections on media use, gender, identity and power.

A pioneering self-staging practice

Tandberg started out with a brief but significant period of theatre studies; dramatisation through disguise and role-play became central to her artistic practice. Tandberg’s breakthrough came in the 1990s with works that established an artistic practice in which her own body was used as a method for critical self-staging and investigations of identity.

In the series Bride (1993), she dressed in a wedding gown and visited professional photographers who took bridal portraits of her with eleven different men, later published as wedding annoiuncements across 23 Norwegian newspapers, disrupting the perception of the bride as a symbol of traditional monogamy.

The series Living Together (1996) presents carefully staged photographic scenes from everyday domestic life, in which Tandberg appears alongside herself. Working with early digital image‑editing techniques – at a moment when such tools were only beginning to enter artistic photographic practice – she seamlessly combines multiple exposures into a single frame, creating the uncanny impression that she is living with her own twin.

In Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003), a heavily pregnant Tandberg wears a latex mask of an elderly man, along with a men’s suit.

Tandberg’s oeuvre is in dialogue with the likes of Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman and Tracey Emin, artists who, as Tandberg puts it, “made work by travelling around with themselves.” This playfulness is a joyful end to itself – and a strategy for messing with social realities, too, whether it is identity or the media that reproduce it.

Tandberg is perhaps most herself when in the process of becoming someone else, and she has continuously expanded her artistic register. Film, sculpture, fiction writing and theatre plays are now integrated parts of a diverse body of work characterised by formal curiosity and thematic shifts.

Identity is a complex construct, and the artist remains present: sharp, inquisitive and multifaceted. Her focus on the plurality of the self involves frequent use of the persona ‘Vibeke Tandberg’, and the visual and symbolic orders that prop her up.

Gender also looms as a cultural force. Tandberg has been called “a matriarchal wolf in sheep’s clothing” with a knack for saying “forget the prince” (in the words of Gertrud Sandqvist). By enacting the plasticity of female (self-)perception, Tandberg's work makes it possible to see – and contest – gazes that construct and perform gender in the visual field.

Doomed Americana and plaster casts

Of late, Tandberg’s artistic trajectory has turned to political commentary addressing a global public sphere. Her recent work also echoes the Gothic taste for shock and the manipulation of the human form. The nightmarish Echo’s Bones (2021), consisting of distorted plaster casts of the artist’s own head, is a work from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The exhibition title They Live – which is also the title of Tandberg’s newest film work – points to this continued relevance. The phrase is borrowed from director John Carpenter's delightfully tacky actionhorror film They Live from 1988, which allegorises Reagan-era neoliberal America with an alien invasion.

A doomed America looms in new films that Tandberg has created specially for the exhibition, including Post Americana (2026), in which a scruffy cowboy bites the dust in a desolate and indistinct landscape, or They Live (2026) where atmospherically grainy footage dwells on scenographic elements – light, smoke, and chicken feathers; an endgame to be taken over by mere effects.

Series of survey exhibitions

They Live is part of Kode’s series of survey exhibitions featuring artists with personal and professional ties to Bergen.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive bilingual exhibition catalogue in English and Norwegian featuring a conversation between Tandberg and the novelist Chris Kraus about the uses of self in art and fiction, and new essays by film scholar Maria Moseng and the exhibition’s guest curator Lars Bang Larsen. The catalogue also includes earlier scholarship on Tandberg’s work, in the form of essays by Fred Hansen and Gertrud Sandqvist