Vibeke Tandberg was an early champion of photo manipulation. Discover her work in her native Norway

The first thing you see as you enter Vibeke Tandberg’s new show is her face, twice. A monitor shows Merge (1998), a 16mm film in which the photographer has double-exposed herself onto herself. It’s a simple effect, but this low-res doubling is a synecdoche of Tandberg’s body of work: there is no one single self.

Questions of identity and performativity run throughout ‘They Live’, a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode in Tandberg’s native Norway. The show tracks Tandberg’s career, from her early photo projects in the 1990s to more recent plaster works and videos shown for the first time. A key figure from the Nordic wave of young artists in the 1990s, Tandberg was an early advocate for digital photography and photo manipulation. For Living Together (1996), Tandberg used then-new photo editing tools to create a photo series in which she appears as her own twin. In Faces (1998), she merged her face with other people’s, creating androgynous, fictional portraits. The results are unsettling, not because they enter uncanny-valley territory, but rather because they seem hyperrealistic. There’s a clear through-line between these 30-year-old works and today’s debate around authenticity and truth in imagery.

Tandberg herself appears many times throughout ‘They Live’, but she insists that these are not self-portraits. 'That’s a loaded term,' she told me. 'It feels like a self-portrait is done because you want to tell people something about your inner self. It's confiding in the viewer something more psychological than I have ever been interested in. For me, it’s always been more conceptual.'

Tandberg, who started life in the theatre before training to be a photographer, has always enjoyed dress-up. She came to national attention with the Bride series (1993), in which she appears as an idealised newlywed alongside 11 different men. The photographs were published as wedding announcements in local newspapers on the same day, 24 July. The project established Tandberg’s main interests: performativity, playfulness, but also a desire to provoke and critique patriarchal norms.

In 2003, Tandberg bought her most important accessory. She purchased a latex mask and the character of ‘old man’ was born. He appears in much of Tandberg’s subsequent work. Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003) shows Tandberg, pregnant with twins at the time, performing the role of the aged man, heaving himself up and down a flight of stairs. 'It was such a relief to get rid of my own face,' Tandberg says. 'I was grateful to work within a mask, hiding myself.'

Soon, however, she let other people perform the role. 'It could be anyone in that mask,' she says. 'I didn't really need it to be myself anymore.' The mask is worn by the ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova in Old Man Dancing (2021) and by an assistant in Post Americana (2026), a new film for the exhibition where the old man is a dying cowboy.

The most interesting moments of ‘They Live’, however, star Tandberg’s face – and these are not confined to photography. Echo’s Bones (2021), named after a Beckett short story and realised during the Covid pandemic, contains 87 plaster busts of Tandberg: they lie on the floor, distorted and brutalised – like a graveyard of mutilated selves. As with Bride, Echo’s Bones sees Tandberg using herself to play with conceptual, if unsettling, ideas. Echo’s Bones looks like a society that’s died, but it’s also the same death mask over and over.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue contains several essays that situate Tandberg in an intellectual framework; her work is interpreted through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others. The exhibition itself, however, only has introductory wall text. We are left to interpret the works ourselves – but not before feeling something first. Tandberg’s oeuvre is well suited to theoretical discussion, but audiences shouldn’t let ideas stand in the way of emotional engagement. After all, Tandberg’s entire career, from the camp to the macabre, is rooted in play.

‘They Live’ is at Kode Bergen Art Museum until 12 September 2026

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