KARIM NOURELDIN – VIBEKE TANDBERG

Over a period of more than two years, Karim Noureldin (*1967) created countless small wooden objects that replicate the winding corridors of New York subway stations. The result is a collection of countless, almost abstract figures that are, in reality, a typology of spatial memory. The work also serves as a piece of biography: the Swiss artist has been living in New York for several years, and his models represent attempts to make the city his own, with the subway lines serving as its lifelines. Other works by the artist have also emerged from such extensive research, such as the drawing space that Karim Noureldin will present in Thun.
More than 1,200 individual sheets “cover” the exhibition space in a seemingly casual arrangement. Karim Noureldin is a spatial artist. This is true even though the spaces he occupies are sparsely furnished and yet are anything but empty. He is known for his installations in which he drapes huge sheets of drawing paper around the rooms, thereby obscuring the architectural structure. Viewers suddenly find themselves standing in the middle of a drawing. Karim Noureldin knows how to expand the possibilities of the medium of drawing in a striking way by taking it into other dimensions. At the same time, in his sculptural work, he places himself in the reductive and essentializing situation of the model.

The figure is at the center of Vibeke Tandberg’s (*1967) work. The Norwegian artist usually uses herself as a model. In a role-playing scenario, she impersonates the male movie hero Robert De Niro, who, as a cool taxi driver in Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name, drives aimlessly through New York. In *Beautiful*, the artist satirizes the traditional female beauty ideal of the blonde, staging her image in such an exaggerated way that the seductive splendor becomes a grotesque mask. The artist also experiments with duplicating her own persona and challenges herself to a small boxing match. Vibeke Tandberg presents photographic, film, and video works, some of which are on view in Thun for the first time. The artist has become known primarily for her digitally manipulated photographs, in which she, for example, interweaves the faces of two people. With her current works, she creates captivatingly powerful images without technical effort, using only a few simple props and poses. She expands the range of personal possibilities, creating images of a multifaceted identity whose significance extends far beyond the individual, pointing to a general cultural sensibility.