Tine Oksbjerg’s video works focus on the minor everyday stories that develop from encounters between people and social situations. In this context, Oksbjerg is particularly interested in the distinctions between social groups and communities and how people interact as social individuals within them. Oksbjerg’s works can be read as extended tableaux or brief insights into a longer story that is never fully revealed to the observer. In her videos, Oksbjerg uses the seductive power of close-ups and detail shots, which are familiar to us from television or cinema.
In Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Tine Oksbjerg is showing the video installation “We will meet again but don’t know when”, which has been made during her stay in Berlin and is based on the “hairdressing salon” as a meeting place. The customers find themselves in a situation that is as intimate as it is impersonal or businesslike. Here, they often talk about personal matters and thus create a specific image of themselves, while their physical appearance is being changed by the hairdresser’s work.
Tine Oksbjerg deliberately chose hairdressing salons in Berlin from a wide spectrum of social environments and urban districts, and filmed the customers as they were being “beautified”. The scenes are joined to a whole by the soundtrack, which distributes the recorded conversations through a triple projection of the visual material. In this way, Tine Oksbjerg creates a virtual community, in which social boundaries and codes are no longer significant.