Biography
Tonje Bøe Birkeland (b. 1985), from Bergen, Norway, received an MFA from Bergen Academy of Art & Design. In 2008 she started working with THE CHARACTERS, aiming to encapsulate an entire artistic practice. For the past 10 years she has, through The Characters, given women a position within the landscape while exploring the authenticity of history. While the romantic motives of the male wanderer have been well-documented, in Birkeland’s project, female explorers are staged in Unknown Territory. In front of the heroine looms grand exploration; beneath her, history is formed.
Through THE CHARACTERS Birkeland has been awarded The Victor Fellowship by the Hasselblad Foundation (2012), silver in the Norwegian book design contest Årets Vakreste Bøker (2017), and presented in her own artist book The Characters (2016), the Norwegian Journal of Photography, Fritt Ord, Oslo (2017) and Girl on Girl – Art & Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, by Charlotte Jansen, Laurence King Publishing, London (2017).
Portfolio
The Characters
Since 2008, through The Characters, Birkeland has given women a position within the landscape while exploring the authenticity of history. On various expeditions, female explorers are staged in Unknown Territory. The Characters are self-portraits expounding time and place, investigating personality and physical limits.
Materials have been gathered from their journeys, yielding stories and installations. Characters #I – V includes large format portraits of Aline Victoria Birkeland (1870-1952), geologist and glaciologist and her travels in the high Arctic and Spitzbergen, Tuva Tengel (1901-1985), desert traveller, author and photographer of the Gobi Desert, Luelle Magdalon Lumière (1873-1973), stereo photographer – a traveller among islands, societies and continents, Anna Aurora Astrup (1871-1968) who sailed along the East Coast of Greenland in 1900 and Bertha Bolette Boyd (1900-1985), mountaineer and author, who travelled to Bhutan in the 1930s.
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