9e Biennial of Moving Images Centre pour l'image cotemporaine Saint-Gervais, Genève

TOBIAS BERNSTRUP

Detecting a virtuality that is at work in the architecture of Rem Koolhaas's "Generic Cities", those great supercities whose fake facades reveal nothing of what they might actually conceal, Tobias Bernstrup quite logically returned to them for the setting of his videos, which are strongly inspired by video games. It is no longer "the phenomenal appearance of reality" (Edmond Couchot) that is being sought. Rather, to evoke it is enough. The flat field on the screen function like a mise en abîme, a work withing a work. A similar fascination to the surfaces of facades but also of human bodies can be seen in Bernstrup's pictorial activity. The handful of characters in his videos, decked out in the symbols of a conventional eroticism, function like background elements. They don't occupy a dominant position as in the case in animated films, where figures are "stuck onto" a background. Like the cities they inhabit, these beings are devoid of any particular identity. Actor whose style of acting covers nothing more than their simple presence, Bernstrup's figures are concentrated in places that are characteristic of the urban social theater like swimming pools and dance floors. In the empty shopping mall, however, only advertising photos remain; their presence mirrors that of the human figures. Adopting repetitive movements, the bodies lend only an artificial life to these scenes whose slow tracking shots along architectural perspectives -taking the place of any sort of plot- are punctuated by the soundtrack. The music, which was written by the artist, thus guides the image as in a video clip. These videos characterized by darkness, be it scenes shot at night or underground and whose beginning or end is marked by the fading out, appearance or disappearance of light: nothing. The viewer's gaze floats around like the body in the swimming pool of Penthouse Idle. As a place of play rather than a reality, these films function as surfaces for the projections of viewers, the only real figures at the heart of the artist's video installation. The videos also contributes to a mise en scène created by Tobias Bernstrup (witness Tonight Live), in a spirit akin to his performances, in which the slightest discontinuity with a real singer's show creates a malaise.

Text by Hélène Cagnard Translated from the French by John O'Toole