Her work is as theatrical as ever, but now its stagecraft leaps combatively into the space of the viewer. This historical space is a present that narcissistically sucks past and future into its orbit. As philosopher Boris Groys writes in his essay “Comrades of Time” (that supplies the rest of the exhibition’s title), it is a contemporaneity that makes history serve its own purposes: the present, according to Groys, has ceased to be a ‘point of transition from the past to the future, becoming instead a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future – of constant proliferation of historical narratives beyond grasp or control.’
And worse than that. In the work Hestearkivet numerous body parts of a horse lie scattered on the gallery floor, like after a carpet bombing. It is death-within-death: As they were cast from a taxidermic specimen, the ghostly bits and pieces are twice removed from life. There is even a triple absence in there, considering that the horse is what remains of an equestrian statue when the patriarch is gone.
The horse reappears in the public sculpture Hestebarrikaden, a work commissioned by Norsk Billedhuggerforening and on display until August 2024 in Øvre Slottsgate. Here it evokes the infamous, violent confrontation between youth protesters and mounted Oslo police that took place in 1978, just a few blocks away. Hestebarrikaden is a non-ument for the publicly unrepresented historical event, an un-work that transfigures the horse as a symbol of freedom with a pointed ambiguity towards the weaponization of oversized flowerpots in anti-terror design strategies.
In the photographs, Old Man Cowboy, the horse returns as the sidekick of a lone figure made out as a cowboy with a latex mask. His appearance is silly bordering on grotesque. On a stage that is as shallow as a bad movie, liberty’s clichéd guardian and his moldy mount are going nowhere: under a pale spotlight and through billowing theatre smoke, his lassoing is a forlorn gesture around a dying empire.
Other photographic works from The Old Man Cowboy series will also be displayed publicly in the windows of Statsbygg’s empty buildings on Møllergata, their proximity to the nearby government facilities echoing the national trauma of 2011. They are scheduled to be unveiled by the end of January and will be viewable spring of 2024. The series feeds off Tandberg’s earlier film and photo works with the old man mask, as in the iconic and pregnant Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003), or recently, in Old Man Dancing, a film from 2021 in which he appears as a ballerina.
As in most of the other works in the series, the old man is played by the artist. She is also a bit of a cowboy, then – as we no doubt all are around these parts, what with Norway drilling away and Denmark’s arms export hitting new heights with every war in the Middle East. Sweden, too, has long excelled in the old game of guns and roses; social democrats selling cannon.
Yippee-ki-yay, indeed. Freedom dies hard.
