Artist Tobias Sternberg works mainly with sculpture and video. In both media his concern is to investigate the human condition in a broad sense. It is not so much recent events and worldly conflicts that interests him as the underlying behaviours and conditions that govern our personal lives and history alike. Myth, superstition and belief is a central theme as both symptoms and sources of human culture and habits.

In his videowork this investigation often focus on the way reality is perceived and described, on prejudice of the mind and deception of the senses. There is a strong element of theatricality in all videos, a curtain of fiction which is raised to avoid any mistaken claims at directly grasping reality, whatever that is. The vidceos also delight in presenting visual illusions or absurd obstructions altering the way events unfold on the screen. The simplicity of performances either by the artist or by the camera itself is complicated by interventions both humorous and cruel.

In his sculptures Tobias focuses more on the physical consequences and traces of human culture. He believes that since we have formed our direct environment to suit us, dissecting it will reveal its hidden motivations and conditions. A chair is not only a construction to sit on, it is also a map of the human body and the way we use it. Furniture, toys, clothes, tools are as much formed by culture as they are by physical neccessity and functionality. In this sense all man made items can be seen as antropomorhic, and can be used as stand-ins or dummys for humans in talking about our immediate culture. As a way of investigating and revealing this Tobias often start with used everyday items, altering them to invest them with human qualities, emphasizing their emotional characters, their weaknesses and traits.

For his residency at the National Sculpture Factory he asked the staff to collect cast out old furniture that was unwanted. Taking them as a starting point he improvises personalities and constructs elaborate stories of human misery and joy, working close to the material as something between an archaologist and an inventor, both unearthing and fabulating.

Tobias Sternberg 2006