Stone and Singer Performance Image

Vivid and wild, the performance work of Norwegian artist Tori Wrånes is strange and compelling; linked to music and to endurance performance practice.

Over the opening weekend, Wrånes presented Stone and Singer (2014), a new performance developed for the 19th Biennale of Sydney. In the grandeur of the Turbine Shop on Cockatoo Island, the artist faces danger head-on, taking the audience into a pre-modern place, into a world wonderful, dangerous and exhilarating. In this effort she is accompanied by a cast of brass players, and a menagerie of fantastical creatures who emerge from her playful psyche, linked to the folkloric traditions of hero helpers and the banished Jötnar race of Norse mythology.

Initially studying theatre at the University of Ripon and York St John, and an Advanced Program in Music at Agder University College, Kristiansand, Wrånes was a member of an electro-rock band before commencing her studies at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2004. Graduating in 2009, Wrånes has gone on to fuse elements of theatre, music, sculpture and installation in compellingly unique performance pieces.

Atmospheric settings play a central role in Wrånes’s performances, as do elements of theatricality, physicality and the artist’s hauntingly beautiful operatic voice. Loose Cannon (2010) saw Wrånes play a grand piano that was suspended from the side of a cliff-like bunker on the island of Kuba near Svolvær, Norway. The following day an audience gathered hoping to witness an encore performance; instead, Wrånes threw a burning torch at the piano, which exploded into flames. In Natural Enough? (2011), festival-goers at the Hove Festival in southern Norway found Wrånes and a group of sword-playing accompanists suspended on high in a nearby forest, the artist hanging by her hair and her voice echoing through the trees.

Wrånes presented Spin Echo (2012) as part of LAXART’s ‘Art in the Parking Space’ series, an initiative that invited artists to create ephemeral artworks in parking spaces across Los Angeles. Wrånes’s performance took place on the seventh level of the Disney Concert Hall/REDCAT car park, an empty space that served as a minimalist backdrop for an abstract musical interlude. Singers on bicycles circled continuously, while accordion players on wheeled platforms were swung around in concentric circles. The performers filled the otherwise bleak and utilitarian concrete space with layers of atmospheric sound that reverberated in discordant harmonies.

Wrånes has performed at numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally, including Performa 13, New York (2013); ‘I Wish This Was A Song: Music in Contemporary Art’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012–13); ‘Topsy Turvy’, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2012); 2nd Colombo Art Biennale (2012); ‘SPIN ECHO’, LAXART, Los Angeles (2012); Merging Grounds Performance Festival, Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2011); ‘RUN ’n JUMPS’, Haninge Konsthall, Stockholm (2011); and Lofoten International Art Festival (2010).

Tori Wrånes, Stone and Singer, 2014, performance, voice and sculpture. Performance for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist. Created for the 19th Biennale of Sydney. This project was made possible through the generous support of SCANLAN THEODORE. Photograph: Sebastian Kriete