BIRTHE MARIE LØVEID 2000

Text on Bjørg Tarangers works

Bjørg Taranger askes herself about human existence in urban life.
Do humanistic values have any status in society today?
In many of her works she uses the Red Cross as an equivalent symbol used by humanity to display our need to give or receive help. She brings us into situations where we can buy or receive different kinds of care and attention, pointing out that we sometimes have to use extremely coded expressions/messages to be seen.
She touches the need of the urban people to appear as individuals, to be respected and cared for.

In an unprejudiced way Bjørg Taranger uses her visual language to share humanity.

Producer
Birthe Marie Løveid 2000

LARS VILKS 1998

Croix Urbaines - Urban Crosses - Urbane Kors

CROIX URBAINES

Bjørg Tarangers project Croix Urbaines is a work that concentrates on a social function in the city environment.

The cross symbol, which is a recognisable mark of the work, alludes to the cross signal as a positive communicator, a willingness to help and meet.

One of the big discussions in today's art world is the position and roll of public art.  A long tradition concerning the erection of concrete and in principle immovable monuments has been replaced with the tendency to use the public room as an exhibition space.

Public art transforms the stable to the random, from monumental to communicative, from slow to intense. It is within this context that the project Croix Urbaines is to be seen.

Bjørg Taranger when placing her objects and posters changes the city environment into an installation of a project.

The projects meaning can be found through questions surrounding the kind of room/city environment and as to how people will communicate with it.

The viewers curiosity when confronted with these cryptically messages and signs is easily triggered, the whole point is in that this energy is the actual possibility; it is up to the viewer to put meaning into the signal that is sent out:

Stations for the seeking, a help that is not necessary, but could at the same time  be important.

Lars Vilks
1998

ELISABETH BYRE 2004

Poetic and political on our existential conditions, on Bjørg Taranger and her project City Angel

POETIC AND POLITICAL ON OUR EXISTENTIAL CONDITIONS

Bjørg Taranger`s work entitled City Angel is a bold and confrontational project. Bold, because it focuses on significant and serious questions concerning existence, such as compassion, life and death, without lapsing into cliché. Confrontational in its clear and explicit articulation. The works appeal to the public in a very direct and insistent way – regardless of whether they are presented in Oslo Central station, in a gallery space or on a private wall.

The project originated from a personal encounter with the Norwegian health service. Experience, gained from when her mother was a corridor patient at Haukeland hospital in Bergen, became the beginning of a series of exhibitions at home and abroad, with the nurse as axis. The subtitle is “preparing a private space”, and it was precisely this lack of a personal, private space that was the catalyst for the idea and the personal compulsion to highlight the problem in an artistic context.

Taranger uses the nurse (city angel) as a symbol for the humane and the compassionate; she claims that her utopian dream is a society where basic human values have first priority. Historically the figure of the nurse and female carer is eternal. From the Bible’s Maria Magdalena to self-sacrificing figures such as Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa – life-essential and life-giving in their actions.

Taranger highlights contemporary institutionalised care organs like hospitals and health personnel. In the video “Preparing A Private Space” we see two simultaneous images. On the right hand-side we see two nurses making up a bed. Details of bed linen being laboriously applied by experienced hands display a ceremonious character, and initially appear as painterly and dream-like, in substance beautiful. The images are lingeringly slow and share few elements of the institution or sickness. A little later, when the bed stands ready, the camera reveals more and more of the institutionalised room.

In contrast to the poetic scenario is a plastic sheet applied to the middle of the bed (protection against faeces and urine), a confrontation and reminder that the space is public, it is a public bed where hundreds of people have lain and will lie, an impersonal bed pretending something private – a private space. The left hand-side image presents the back of a pair of white, high-healed shoes bearing red crosses; they run along something one comprehends as a corridor. These impractical heels are a humoristic twist with a sharp ironic undertone: High heals are a far cry from the reality of nurses, who depend on sensible, foot-friendly shoes in their daily corridor race. And the presentation of the sexy nurse is a familiar cliché. The visuals are sparse. We see nothing other than the eternally running shoes, with their copious crosses catching our eyes, and the image appears urgent and stressed, insistent in its repetition.

In contrast to the action on the screen the video is a comment on the situation of the vulnerable patient, where the patient must be treated with respect and care, and to the demanding work situation of personnel in hospitals and institutions today. Again this indicates society’s negligence of the sick and needy with regard to the allocation of resources and economic means. At the same time the work is a tribute to carers in hospitals and institutions today.

The filming and handling of the nurses actions are reminiscent of one of video’s virtuosos – Bill Viola. In the work “The Passing” (1991) Viola films his mother’s deathbed in a sublime way, meticulously and gently. Taranger has managed to create a similar solemn atmosphere.

In the project City Angel Taranger uses video, installation, happening, performance and still image. She lets professional nurses prepare a sick bed in a gallery space, with public present, while she herself documents the action on video. This documentation strengthens the work’s rhetoric credibility, and introducing the nurse into the gallery space further emphasises the message: This concerns us all, we are all mortal, and we will come to need care and attention sooner or later.

In the1960s and 70s the international Fluxus movement were initiators of a normalisation of art. With performance and happenings the group worked to remove boundaries between the high and the low, between the art institution and the man in the street. They were innovative in the fusion of different art forms, media and expression.

Taranger`s work can be seen as an advancement of a kind of anti – elevation art project, in that she provides us with a similar normalisation of both sickness and art. With the public present at the exhibition opening the nurses actions are applied to aestheticism and the gallery space is normalised to contain hospital function. For a short while the two institutions exchange place.

On today’s art scene the Danish-Norwegian art duo Michael Elmgren and Ingar Dragset similarly pull the hospital and institutionalised care into the gallery with their work “Please Keep Quiet!” (2003). In this work the gallery space is turned into a hospital ward with sick-beds, charts and trolleys. In the beds lie patients in the form of very life-like wax figures. “Please Keep Quiet!” is a clearly articulated reminder of our transitory existence.

In Taranger`s work it is the absence of the patient that becomes the strength, while the plight of the patient is absolutely present despite the fact that the physical patient is not. The still images of the nurses making the bed work as both supplement to the video and as independent works. The silkscreen print’s delicate texture contrasts the hardness of the aluminium plates, just like the softness of the bed linen contra the sickbed’s metal frame. The theme of the work is emphasised by the still image’s clear text, and in this way City Angel can be seen as both a contribution to a steadily on-going health debate, and as an existential work about our fundamental values.

Elisabeth Byre 2004

RALF ROSOWSKI 2007

Bjørg Tarangers video cycle "City Angel" presented in Düsseldorf at Schirmerstrasse 22

Emne:   Extending relations
Fra:   "Ralf Rosowski" <ralf.rosowski@due-erre.de>
Dato:   man, mars 19, 2007, 13:47
Til:   Bjørg Taranger <bjorg.taranger@gmail.com>

EXTENDING RELATIONS

Bjørg Tarangers video cycle "City Angel" presented in Düsseldorf at Schirmerstrasse 22

A hospital bed is the place of medical care.
The place of water and soap, creams, isopropanol, blood, sweat and body liquids.

The screen of Bjørg Taranger is binocular in a meta sense.
Half splitted into a left and a right scene and a small gap in between.

"Preparing a Private Space" is using extended materials like the 
sexy legs of a nurse, wearing WHITE high-heels, both signed with a 
Red Cross on the heel side, running straight along an endless hospital 
corridor followed by the camera view. There seems to be no coming 
further.
A Red Cross on white background is recognized as a protection symbol 
in conflict. (1)
It’s a dramatic case of emergency or it is a case of escape?
The two nurses collaborative preparing a hospital bed on the screen 
right beneath are not really impressed about the running angle 
left side. They are completely absorbed by careful making up the 
hospital bed, highly concentrated on details, very accurate by 
smoothing the linen, contemplation by working. Love, devotion and 
human warmness is the spiritual substances which fills the space.

"Happening with nurses", celebrating a dance by preparing a hospital 
bed, wearing German birkenstocks and a white nurse coat, displaced 
bra straps shining trough. Suddenly the left half of the splitted 
screen gets BLACK for  a second, an interruption followed by a right 
away change of the splitted screen relations.

How fragile Angels are.

City Angel. A love dance or a dance macabre? Lay down and smile. (2)

Bjørg Taranger overcomes the restrictions of a dualistic 
understanding (3) by the expressive use of dance. Intelligent and 
skilled cutting is a lonely job.  But getting teached about dance by 
the nurses Arja-Leena and Paula is a spiritual interaction.
"Our body should go with our soul, with our spirit, shall get moved 
like rush from the divine breath of the inside. Amen" (4)

First time I saw this video works in Ålesund, in the late summer of 
2004. I got deeply moved.
"Angels are with us.", I noticed and continued travelling.
I called Bjørg Taranger more than a year later. After some intensive 
talks we decided to present City Angel during oct. 2006 to the public 
in Düsseldorf at SchirmerStraße 22, an apartment, temporary used as 
Gallery, near by the city.

The installation in Düsseldorf was quite simple. "Preparing a Private 
Space" (5'29'', 2000) and "Happening with nurses" (5'44'', 2004), got 
directly and simultaneously projected on different white walls in 
same heights, both in a black-&-white-mode, relatively small sized 
and looped. The room used for presentation didn’t got darkened, no 
curtains got used to dim-out the light from the windows.
We had a crowded candlelight opening, a clean place filled with the 
flickering light of the City Angel projection, interfering with all 
the specific individual experiences, fears and hopes of the visitors.
We enjoyed an interesting mix of guests.

After the show, the secretary of the house organisation office, 
responsible for SchirmerStraße 22 called me, asking about City Angel. 
"Is there a social encountering place founded?" Ups, - I understood. 
"Yes, indeed.” I answered smiling.

Ralf Rosowski, march 2007
contact: ralf.rosowski@due-erre.de

(1) The Red Cross is the original and official protection symbol 
declared at the 1864 Geneva Convention. It is, in terms of its color, 
a reversal of the Swiss national flag.
(2) Pina Bausch, contemporary german choreographer, "Sit down and 
smile." (stage direction, 2002)
(3) Rene Descartes (1556 - 1650) Descartes suggested that the body 
works like a machine, that it has the material properties of 
extension and motion, and that it follow the laws of physics. The 
mind or soul, on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial 
entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws 
of physics. This form of dualism proposes that the mind controls the 
body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational 
mind, such as when people act out of passion.
(4) Peter Altenberg (1859 - 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, 
Austria. This quote is taken from the frontispitz of Dr. John 
Schikowski "Geschichte des Tanzes" (Büchergilde Gutenberg, Berlin,) 
1926

RALF ROSOWSKI 2007, ON BJØRG TARANGERS VIDEO WALKS

Text on Bjørg Tarangers "video walks"

Tourism is just a post-modern phenomenon.  It’s travelling for fun.  A  sign of having enough time and money to afford. Tourists like places,  where a lot of tourists are. Tourists are always in between voyeurism  and exhibitionism.

If he get lost in the strange, alone without any  covering, it gets interesting (Roberto Rossellini’s "Viagigio in Italia"). Now he has a chance to experience general eternity of life and the more or less near end of the own living simultaneously. He is in between hope and fear.

Most people panic. Some make films about  it.

Bjørg Tarangers new work "video walks" are episodes about life and living seen from a perspective of a lost tourist.

Ralf Rosowski, Düsseldorf 2007

MARIANNE GATHE 2009

Urban observations, on Bjørg Taranger and her video projects

Bjørg Taranger (b. 1953) works mainly with video and photo-based installations. Her documentary material is recorded both locally and as a result of residencies in South America, Berlin and Paris. Taranger’s projects are often formulated over a number of years and are developed by continuous processing and re-contextualization. Regular travel, new experience and new recordings result in a dynamic weave of images and events. When seen together, all Taranger’s projects provide the impression of a unique presence, which reflects her method based on participation as well as observation. Sometimes she appears in her own recording as a genuine figure, while at other times she works from a distinct distance. This method supplements the material with a distinct authenticity that also displays the ethical and aesthetic approaches Taranger practices in her artistic work.

One particular work that reflects this approach is a recording from a subway in Berlin: The recording shows Taranger and her partner waiting on a subway platform, nothing in particular happens, they don’t talk to each other, no one in particular walks by or even seems to attract their attention, there’s no hint of any especially positive or negative atmosphere, we quite simply watch the two characters take a few restless steps, they are simply waiting for a train. What is distinct is that Taranger films herself via a surveillance camera, which in turn has filmed Taranger and her partner. Is the recording intended as an aesthetic motif or is it ethical reflection over our surveillance culture. Probably both.       

Three projects contributing to the definition of Bjørg Taranger as an artist are City Angel (2000-), Curing Walls (2007-) and Human Walls (2008-). City Angel examines social care in the welfare state. Indifference converted to professionalized care becomes both celebrated and challenged with humour and sincerity. Curing walls is a series of pharmaceutical crosses filmed in Paris. The individual crosses are organised into video sculptures with 9 blinking crosses in one image, edited into a continuous loop. Found on every corner in French cities and villages, this neon sign stands as both an aesthetic, familiar form and as a signal for an accessible pharmaceutical depot, for the relief and concern for us as human beings. The pure and clear lines of the pharmaceutical cross can be understood as a contrast to the users’ physical condition. The blinking in Taranger’s loop doesn’t help; is the situation alarming?
Human walls is of a series of film clips from urban situations developed into different patterns. A mechanical, hypnotic sound accompanies the loops and the knowledge that authentic people make up each surface pattern, which would seek to make real life and stories disappear…but not quite…

These works, in all their simple complexity, provide ample insight into Taranger’s method and also display her considerable ability to present a reality for the observer that’s both completely real and reflective of social development. However these works also provide observers with a series of tableaux vivants, for evaluation on the basis of individual aesthetic norms and pleasures.                

Since Kunstakademiet i Bergen 1998 (Bergen National Academy of the nArts), Bjørg Taranger has exhibited nationally and internationally in a series of solo exhibitions; amongst others, Centro Municipal de Expsiciones SUBTE in Montevideo, Uruguay, Galleria Jangva in Helsinki, Ralf Rosowski in Düsseldorf, The London Institute Gallery in London and Aalesunds Kunstforening in Ålesund. She has also participated in a series of significant group exhibitions from which the following are selected -  ArtGendabienniale2000 in Helsinki, several of Statens Kunstutstillinger - latest in 2007, Video tour- 6 artists,  Kabuso, Nordheimsund in Norway and the most recent in summer 2009 “Nordiskt sommarljus-4 Nordiska kvinner”, Konsthallen in Hishult, Sweden.

Since 1997 Bjørg Taranger has received a series of national and international grants/awards and several prizes for her work. She has been purchased by among others, Stavanger Tingrett and Haukeland Universitetssykehus, Bergen.

In 2009 and 2010 Bjørg Taranger will exhibit solo exhibitions in Galleri Gathe in Bergen and in Christiansands Kunstforening in Kristiansand.

Marianne Gathe, Bergen, September 2009

Translated from Norwegian by Gillian Carson

TOMMY OLSSON 2009

Off the grid, text on Bjørg Tarangers video project URBAN MOSAIC

We can safely say that mosaic has a long history behind it. Video has a somewhat shorter history but it’s in place. Even mosaic’s presence in video media has a history, it might even play an active role in the media’s origin, the electronic picture is after all based on small points. Common to all histories is a labyrinth of alternative courses, parallel discussions and things that never lead anywhere. Bjørg Taranger’s work can be understood as a meeting place for all these components or perhaps some kind of transit hall? Because when we access the material and examine the components we discover what it’s made of. These are video loops, often only a few seconds in duration, treated by a variety of filters to apply pauses and vibrations in a kaleidoscopic, flashy, visual explosion. What happens when you put something in a loop – and this is the magical hold everyone instinctively understands – is that you in a way sabotage our comprehension of time as a linear progression. I will go as far as to say that you actually interfere in time itself – you don’t stop it but rather mess around with the continuity of it and thus apply incalculable effects.

I can supply a couple of examples, both of which are coincidently neighbour clashes. Some of my acquaintances maintain a well above average interest in the occult and I consulted one of them for advice on a very charged situation with a particular neighbour. This neighbor had taken to enthusiastic hammering on the plumbing if I as much as breathed in my apartment and I was advised to record the sound of the hammering, and play it endlessly every time I went out. It wasn’t even necessary to leave it on an especially high volume, it just had to sit there hammering away in its loop. I didn’t particularly like this idea however, the neighbor was a grandiose snorer and I managed to record some of the snoring and let it play in a loop when I went out. It took less than a week before the neighbor stopped me on the stairs and apologized, informing me of a mega-migraine. Afterwards all was quiet and peaceful again. As a result I began to experiment a little. It so happened that the back yard was frequently occupied by a gang of rowdy people who practiced summer annoyance. I managed to record an exceptional sequence of 45 minutes from my bedroom window and then played it the following day out of the same window – again on no especially high volume. They were nowhere to be seen for the rest of the summer. What happens is one simply creates a hole in time and it’s unpleasant for whom it ought to be unpleasant.

 In the context of Bjørg Taranger’s video work however, my personal experimentation with making holes in time constitutes only a fraction of the rationale. It’s equally important to note that many, if not all of these short sequences revolve around the active use of one or another form of transport. We may, if we want to, understand it as a body of fragmentary impression from a long journey but since I’m in the mood for the magical, it ought to be understood as a wisely selected apparatus in a work of poetry aimed at a precise destination. Because the train never leaves the station – it starts all over again from where it began two seconds earlier, and does so on a screen filled by the same times thirty. The most important and most striking – the first we notice as an observer – is that the pattern itself emerges as a consequence of this interference. Hypnotic and surely risky for epileptics, it stands with Brion Gysin´s Dream machine in trance-inducing mode.

 Therefore this is definitively a meeting place – something supported by other short sequences from a shopping centre or a train station – for different stories and ideas. However it’s also a random location; a place for transit, because even with all these signs of a journey, it’s static and showers us with flicker, and it’s exactly here that the journey begins. Through interfering in the moment with such consequence and consistency, Bjørg Taranger opens the door in Harry Potter fashion to another world that we know fuck-all about. (I imagine however that all similarity ceases at this point, there are no dragons and princesses lurking anywhere here.) As a starting point for investigating one’s own inner space, this is both a friendly and generous manoeuvre. The observer knows what the signs mean and that it’s their own substance, their own memory that makes these associative elements functional. The captain welcomes you on board. This journey takes either 2 hours and 50 minutes or it never, ever ends. We’ll see.          

Tommy Olsson,Bergen 27. September 2009

Translated from Norwegian by Gillian Carson

BJORN INGE FOLLEVAAG 2015

The necessity of repetition. About Bjørg Taranger

Street photography is not journalism. Street photography ignores outside opinion because the street photographer is driven by subjective observation, sense and reaction. As the street photographer reacts the subject is already disappearing.

Our everyday lives often consist of repetitive habits and actions. One could even claim that repetitive action is a main characteristic of our existence; Human activity, conversation and even language could be described as near monotonous repetition. According to the existentialist philosopher Heidegger, the human form of being, das Dasein (being there) symbolizes our relentless focus on what existence could or might have been. Das Dasein – man’s being in the world – is based on caring and attentive awareness; key elements of Bjørg Taranger’s artistic practice. Like many other artists working with photography - Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank - the challenges of ordinary life and everyday activity are important to Taranger. But she is perhaps more influenced by the American photographer Lewis Hine, who for years documented child labour in American mines and factories in more than 5000 images. These anonymous documentary images were instrumental to the reform and abolishment of child labour in America.

Taranger’s video works are highly influenced by street photography. The works are unpretentious, with an eye for narratives that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She offers a candid but clearly edited picture of everyday life as well as an appeal to the imagination; how might these stories develop? Like in everyday life, they are repetitive and appear self contained; isolated, seemingly independent of time or any clear storyline beyond what is captured on film. After years of systematic documentation Taranger has an immense amount of material, which she splits; cross cuts and reassembles without the need for a linear timeframe. Although a small or peripheral marker in an image might date the work, time remains subservient to the essential event; the people or movement it depicts.

The Danish philosopher and theologian K.E. Løgstrup, known for his philosophical essay"The Ethical Demand", claims that an ethical demand is always tacit and based on recognition – a recognition that “when we meetthe other we always hold a piece of his life in our hands”. The philosophical point is that relationships between humans are often based on power, and with inequality of power the ethical demand becomes essential.

In the spirit of Løgstrup, Taranger’s street photography/street video lets her «hold something of the other’s life in her hands». Taranger’s subjects have not consented to or been informed about their participation. They are often unaware of being filmed and therefore subjected to Taranger’s ethical awareness, an ethical awareness that is a key characteristic in the reworking of her raw material.

Another interesting parallel can be found in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film describing the meeting between a French actress recording an anti-war film in Japan, and her encounter with a Japanese architect who is trying to come to terms with the atrocities of Hiroshima. They are both confronted by their past and attempting to come to terms with what has happened to them. The timeline never reveals whether the story happened in 1945 or 1959. Nor is this essential. The film critic Kent Jones describes it as: “…… dissolving the barriers between film time and real time, fictional space and real space, stories and documentaries. …erecting a complex, rhythmically precise fictional construction in which pieces of reality are caught and allowed to retain their essential strangeness and ominous neutrality”. Or as David Green writes about Sections of a Happy Moment (2007) by video artist David Claerbout, another of Taranger’s sources of inspiration - “What one actually experiences or indeed what one sees in this work, is not the conflation of photography and film but, a conjuncture of the two mediums in which neither ever loses its specificity. We are thus faced with a phenomenon in which two different mediums co-exist and seem to simultaneously occupy the same object. The projection screen here provides a point of intersection for both the photographic and filmic image”.

But perhaps Taranger’s interest in David Claerbout’s work becomes more evident if we look at his work Sunrise from 2009; an 18 minute long work filmed in almost complete darkness, about a maid who having finished her work just before dawn, leaves the house on her bike and cycles into a desolate landscape to the sound of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise (1912). The parallel to Taranger’s Lavanderia (Laundry), (2014) lies in the focus on people and situations rarely observed.

The shift between past and present provides Taranger with the opportunity to discuss presence; the essential issue of being and of having been. About traces and movements that will never be recorded in our history books but which, through her work, become significant; whether it is a film about an elderly man dancing tango in a park in Buenos Aires, a homeless man who tries his best to hide from the camera or a maid doing laundry for her affluent employers. In the video After the raid # I-IV (2014) Taranger attends to a constant stream of approaching airplanes without knowing their purpose or destination. A helicopter hovers over the landscape and a sense of surveillance becomes a key element of the medial narrative and political reference reminiscent of Norwegian artist Per Kleiva’s images of the Vietnam War. Taranger uses media narratives to discuss how the presentation of news may create false impression, as in the CNN quote from George Bush, where he claims that the war in Iraq will create «a better future» - repeated ad nauseam in an endless loop.

Taranger’s video works focus on everyday situations and events. Her approach is personal but never private. The thin line between personal and private is often difficult to maintain. In a Norwegian art context the contrast between being personal and private can perhaps best be illustrated through the works of the artist Charlotte Thiis-Evensen and her merciless exposure of people’s private lives – or in the work of Swedish artist Anna Odell in «Unknown, Woman 2009 – 349701» in which she simulates suicide from a bridge in Stockholm as part of a performance, without letting the public know that this is all staged.

In view of Løgstrup’s claim that “when we meetthe other we always hold a piece of his life in our hands”, it is ethically questionable when an artist chooses to include life events or human reality without asking for consent. It is vital to assess the ethical consequences of a work of art before it is created. In those cases where the ethical discussion is introduced post production, as in the two cases above, it serves no other purpose than the media attention it creates, rendering the ethical discussion an element of a marketing strategy. An ethical discussion is about «what is good», «what is right», and «how should I act». In a secular, humanistic society, ethics is basically a question of decency. In terms of decency Taranger’s works have a valid ethical foundation, not as something learned, but rather as an integrated dimension of her artistic practice that stems from personal life and experience. Art does not have to be ethical. Art often needs to address moral questions and taboos, of which there are multiple examples. However art should not be harmful; and visual art above all needs to spur emotions. Taranger’s narratives are ethically as well as aesthetically present in the universally recognizable form of constant repetition, day after day, in all cultures of the world.

Translated by Gillian Carson

Bjørn Inge Follevaag
Curator
Bergen October 2015