Vibeke Tandberg's 'They Live' at Kode Bergen Explores Identity Through Photo Manipulation

Vibeke Tandberg, a pioneer of digital photo manipulation from Norway, is the subject of a major retrospective at Kode Bergen Art Museum titled 'They Live,' running until 12 September 2026. The exhibition traces her career from the 1990s to new works, including plaster busts and films. Tandberg gained early fame with 'Bride' (1993), where she posed as a bride with 11 different men in fake wedding announcements published in local newspapers on 24 July. Her 1996 series 'Living Together' used early photo editing to depict herself as her own twin, while 'Faces' (1998) merged her face with others to create androgynous portraits. In 2003, she adopted a latex mask of an old man, a character that appears in works like 'Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase' (2003), where she performed while pregnant with twins, and 'Old Man Dancing' (2021), performed by ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova. A new film 'Post Americana' (2026) features the old man as a dying cowboy. The exhibition also includes 'Echo's Bones' (2021), 87 plaster busts of Tandberg's face, inspired by a Samuel Beckett short story. Tandberg insists her works are not self-portraits but conceptual explorations of identity and performativity. The show features minimal wall text, encouraging emotional engagement over theoretical interpretation, though the catalogue includes essays referencing Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze.