Tobias Bernstrup presents in ADN Galería several of his works along with his participation in Loop Festival 2005 . His performace, in which he will play songs from Killing Spree , will take place on the 12th of November in the club La Paloma as part of the anual party organized by Loop.
Bernstrup is acclaimed for his edgy computer animated videos and genre bending performances. He merges computer game aesthetics with transgender themes in cabaret like performance shows often dressed in androgynous costumes in glossy fetish materials and heavy makeup.
On the album cover the artist poses as a computer game character against a theatrical spaceship interior set, a full scale replica/model made by the artist after the popular computer game Doom. Killing Spree is Bernstrup's 9th music release since he started to record music in 1997. Tobias Bernstrup produces and releases his music in collaboration with museums, instistutions and galleries or through his own artist driven label Tonight Records.
The title "Killing Spree" refers to online computer game language and is one of many game announcements when a player perform or scores a seires of multiple kills without getting killed him/herself. The songs are mostly electronic/synth based with a few bass and guitars added, there are strong references from music of the 80s and early 90s with its genres such as Italo-Disco, Synth, EBM, Gothic rock and New wave, as if Amanda Lear meets Gary Numan.
"...Tobias Bernstrup's work also explores the point at which the real and the virtual meet, although Bernstrup turn the liminality into a positive possibility to play out fantasy, writing on his website that "the game is the perfect fetish reality".
In his Live performances and video installations, such as In The Dead Of Night (2000), Friedrich Passage (2001) and Penthouse Idle (2000) Bernstrup splices images of his real-time locality with a parallel virtual world, mapping photographs of himself and his environments onto the matrix of computer game programmes. Bernstrup and his immediate geographical environs are transplanted into a virtual reality world where, as a simulated avatar, he can play out a specific kind of fantasy which retains an umbilical link to the real world. In his performances such as Tobias Bernstrup Tonight Live, this process is reversed. Bernstrup dresses up in elaborate costumes with rubber surfaces so shiny and perfect and make-up so convincingly 'drag' as to mimic computer renderings of his desired image.
Bernstrup is fascinated with with the fetishistic quality of artificial surfaces, and the soundtracks to his videos are equally airtight and electronic. His work pictures the position of the human subject caught up in and trying to exist by being visible with the enveloping skin of the image world. Bernstrup's work blurs the boundaries of the real and the imaginary by allowing elements of each to seep into the other: as a result of this, his videos have a slighty cut & paste home-made look, but his live performances an unreal, seamless transcendence of real space and time. Givens of real biology or geography are suggested as areas for slippage rather than fixed points in his world in which everything has become surface, none of its aspects wholly traceable back to tangible experince."
extract from Catalogue text by: Catherine Wood "Another Zero" GAMeC (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) Bergamo curated by November Paynter
