Vibeke Tandberg

VIBEKE TANDBERG

A VERSATILE WOMAN

Tandberg explores conventions of gender and identity and how these entities are manifested in private and public spheres, operating on the boundaries between the real and the possible.

Dad 1, 2000

Description
Self-portrait of the artist. A slight young woman wearing a light blue shirt, navy blue trousers and a black leather belt is standing in a domestic interior. Her clothes are clearly oversize. The setting is a bourgeois living room with nice, rather heavy furniture and a seapiece in a much ornamented gold frame.

In both photographs she meets the onlooker's gaze straight on. In Dad #1 the woman is smiling, revealing a set of regular, white teeth, a jarring contrast to the bushy, masculine eyebrows and the wrinkles around the eyes. Dad #2 sports a considerably smaller nose, but the contrast between the delicate, feminine jaw and the masculine upper part of the face remains the same. In this picture the person is not smiling but gazing inscrutably at the onlooker.

About the work
The work is part of the series Dad: six half-length portraits of the artist wearing her father's clothes, her face a mix of her own and her father's. The interior may well be her parents' own living room and part of a nice, conservative home. Yet the portrait has a sense of staging, of theatre, partly due to the professional lighting that sets the pictures apart from normal family portraits and partly due to the depicted person's rather manic expression.
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Tandberg's art in general
Tandberg focuses on her own psycho-social relations to the world around her. In computer manipulated photography and film she explores issues of identity, gender, beauty and how beauty in its stereotypical form is represented in contemporary culture, as well as her own dreams and ambitions. A number of her works can be seen as part of a feminist tradition in which she questions the usual limitations with regards to women's opportunities for self-expression as well as typical media representations.
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Literature
"Vibeke Tandberg", Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2004