Catherine Wood
Another Zero, cat. GAMeC, Bergamo,
curated by November Paynter 2004.

...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.


Catherine Wood