Tori Wrånes

For Tori Wrånes’ first solo show at Carl Freedman Gallery, the artist presents three aspects of an interconnected practice: paintings, sculptures, and a specially commissioned live performance. These bodies of work coalesce into a surreal audio-visual constellation designed to exercise the viewer’s imagination.

Wrånes’ performances are carnivalesque spectacles involving sound installation, prosthetic make-up, costumes, props, kinetic sculpture, and architecture. She draws heavily on the absurd and the unexpected, situating her work in a landscape of dreamlike sculptural fragments. The artist uses her voice as a medium for pure expression as opposed to the vehicle for ‘rational’ speech. She describes her expressionist use of sound as a ‘troll language’: using sound to convey primal emotional truths, bypassing the structural hierarchies of language. This improvised glossolalia leaves meaning ambiguous and welcomes individual interpretations.

In the artist’s words, Drastic Pants is about ‘the dilemma of having two legs which walk in different directions.’ Wrånes’ work draws on a vivid palette of myth and folklore. As a symbol, the troll represents the repressed id: a playful yet dangerous aspect of the psyche, often oppressed by civilizing forces. For Wrånes, society’s distrust of the troll-figure stems from our fear of accepting the duality of human nature: the darkness, as well as the light. This theme is manifest in the performance’s emphasis on duality and the acceptance of a multi-faceted human nature.

Themes of circularity, the cyclical, and the search for a vision of the future permeate both performance and exhibition. The paint-spattered beanbags suspended throughout the gallery refer to both the forms of sleeping trolls and spherical beings of a mythical past — and the potential wholeness of an imagined future.

Tori Wrånes is one of Norway’s leading performance artists. Born in Kristiansand, Norway, in 1978, she has performed and exhibited extensively internationally. Recent performances include The Eccentrics, Sculpture Centre, New York (2016), A Mortal Song, Disjecta, Portland (2016), TENNISCAT, 1646, Den Haag (2015), TRACK OF HORNS, Transart in Bolzano (2015), STONE and SINGER, Sydney Biennial (2014), and YES NIX, Performa 13, New York (2013). This is Wrånes’ first solo exhibition in the UK. She lives and works in Oslo, Norway.