TOBIAS BERNSTRUP
Enemies of the Earth
www.bernstrup.com
Opening:Thursday, March, 29nd, 2007 at 7.30pm.
Closure:Saturday, May, 5th, 2007
Schedules:Tuesday-Friday: 10am-2pm/4pm-8pm and Saturday: 11am-2pm/5pm-8.30pm
ADN Gallery is pleased to announce the first major solo exhibition of the young Swedish artist, Tobias Bernstrup (Gothenburg, 1970) titled “Enemies of the Earth”.
Fascinated by the contemporaneity, Tobias Bernstrup’s work represents the anguish and paradoxes of actual society with the potential strength of self-definition leaving aside conventionalism and the gravitational pull of a given model. The post-productive approach developed by Bernstrup chases the anxiety of believing in improbability, therefore creating personal mythologies that shapes though audiovisual or performance formats. Virtual reality and first computer-games aesthetic like Space Invaders join in purely physical representations of the artist. Experimental and breaking sources bring about the merging between fiction and reality, or between the human and the animal, blurring the borders.
In Enemies of the Earth, Bernstrup adoptsthe metaphorical language and low-tech special-FX techniques used in the early science fiction movies. The core of the video project presented at the gallery is 1:1000 scale model depicting Shangai´s futuristic skyline, where two praying mantis are recorded analogically by Bernstrup, both insects look like two monsters fighting, everything set up by a lighting atmosphere that take us to the dramatism of Fritz Lang film Metropolis (1927).
The recording alludes to human-being fear to be invaded by huge monsters, insect plagues which will finish with our apparently controlled and secured postmodern society. These threats, that are a challenge to socio-economic structures, attract Bernstrup to create situations that are not so far from the fears human genre suffers. Two insects perform in a human context far from their own habitat, where body becomes the vehicle to place new identities.
The architectonic design chosen by Bernstrup fits perfectly with the silver and iridescent mantis skin, while the stylized silhouette of the towers suggests an analogy between the cityscape transformation and the metamorphosis insects suffer in their short life cycle. The soundtrack composed by the artist, inspired from eighties trends such as techno and Synth, encompasses the compulsive ethos of Bernstrup towards redefining and altering roles in contemporary urban society.
Apart from the main video Mantis City, exhibition involves another two videos, the making of the first one as a work in progress and the other is a documentary where Bernstrup performances as a mantis playing his own music, and four prints that document the whole exhibition working with the idea of city poured out by insects as a preview of what we are going to see on the screens. The close-up stills of the insects and the enlarged view of the towers will increase the dramatic atmosphere in the gallery. (no va a traer los modelos)
The MantisCity video has been produced in collaboration with Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shangai with the support from the Arts Grants committee in Sweden. Tobias Bernstrup has an artistic career with exhibitions in major galleries, museums and institutions worldwide among them Palais de Tokyo, BaselMuseum fur Gegenarts Kunst or Biennale of Lyon. He recently had a solo show at Duolun Moma in Shangai.
HOJA DE SALA
By Neus Miró
Tobias Bernstrup´s work enlarges through several ambits that melt together such as performance linked to matters of genre, interactivity and video-game images, architecture and music. Many of these elements are combined in a natural way in his last work MantisCity.
Mantis has several etymologies in the dictionary, and if we take into accounts its Greek origin it refers to a prophet, someone who can see the future, although the popular meaning refers to a species of insect.
MantisCity shows us a city, which viewer immediately associates with a sci-fi film stage inhabited by insects, the Mantis. Bernstrup filmed the video on a scale model taken from Shangai´s city towers like Oriental Pearl and Jim Mao towers. The use of digital technologies so common in videogames reinforces the futurist aspect of the buildings placing them on the border between reality and fiction; this is also echoed in the architectonic confusion. As T. Bernstrup mentions, we are now in a moment where software programming gets extreme amount of realism in the construction of videogames space, and in the other hand architectural designs are increasingly closer to sci-fi movies architecture and that’s why the limits between reality and fiction overlap.
In the video, giant insects climb the buildings; they wander all around the streets until they arrive to their confrontation. The fighting scene, because of its reductive form, seems to move the audience for a moment, to a Chinese shadow spectacle or to a primitive 3D animation. The staging is also inspired in the Chinese old tradition of insect fighting as well as in the early Asiatic sci-fi movies, like Mothra or Godzilla, where cities of the future are attacked by monsters.
The soundtrack of the video, composed by Bernstrup reinforces the inhospitable and hostile character of the recording, as well as the hypnotic and dark staging that predominate the whole video.
