Tobias Bernstrup
03/02/2004 > 24/03/2004
Opening on 31/01/2004, from 6 pm to 9 pm
TOBIAS BERNSTRUP’s videos drag the viewer into the exploration of a contemporary and impersonal city. Created with the "Edit" option of video games – which enables the user to develop new background and game levels –, his works are set in an urban environment which can be either real or generic but always conveys a feeling of ultra modern loneliness. Some of TOBIAS BERNSTRUP's videos are interactive and these he calls 'games'. However, rather than playing, the viewer becomes the actor of a wandering with neither a goal nor an escape, except a programmed death: 'game over'. For TOBIAS BERNSTRUP 'the city represents the space where pain, loss, death and the failure of those who search but never find crystallise'.
For his first gallery exhibition in France, TOBIAS BERNSTRUP presents a new interactive video, X-Seed 4000, named after the highest building ever planed. At the same time an utopia and a project to be achieved in the next 30 years, the 'tower' would as a matter of fact be 4000 meter high and would house one million people on its 800 floors. Built on water in the Tokyo bay, its conic shape would remind that of Mount Fuji-Yama. The 'player' of the video can wander through a deserted city environment, with neither cars nor pollution nor human presence.
Besides photos and another video, In The Dead of The Night, where TOBIAS BERNSTRUP stages his digital female clone on music he wrote, he will also give a musical performance on the day of the opening. Developing the reflections underlying behind his videos about identity and its loss, the artist creates a different character for every performance, from pop singer to gigolo or cross-gender. Singing his electro pop songs about loneliness and confused sexual identity he blurs the frontiers between dandy-ism, German cabaret, androgyny, queer, fetishism and SM.
TOBIAS BERNSTRUP was born in 1970 in Gothenburg, Sweden. He lives and works in New York. He had personal exhibitions at the Gegenwartskunst Museum, Basel (2003), at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and at the Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2002), at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2001).