Anja Bing Vangsnes  “Handmade, Homewoven”

Anja weaves figurative tapestries and creates the foundation for the images as the motif emerges in the frame. Working with the images is both tedious and therapeutic, where each tapestry takes weeks or months to complete. She likes to give herself new challenges with each image. This gives room for continually achieving small victories as she develops new methods to master the medium of woven threads. Her tapestries depict interpersonal and fleeting private motifs while commenting on Internet culture and censorship.



During a rather cold winter stuck inside with the realities of the pandemic, Anja explained to me, “I work from my own home, making tapestries with symbolism and familiar settings, commenting on the late capitalist totalitarian structure we continue to tolerate and accept as a society. I am using a slow medium in contrast to the current pace of society. My motives focus on my body as I try to reclaim it, my boyfriend as a tool to normalize a feminine view on a cis man, and my cat Suki”.  I realized that Anja managed to express clearly and without embellishment, what I had myself been focused on this curatorial season - how do we consider ontologies of embodiment outside of masculine dominated western theory.  



Anja’s expertise in weaving persistently offers critical commentary on popular obsessions social media memes, and bodies. The textile work gestures towards what Kara Walker called a “soft focus” –avoiding the confluence of disgust and desire we find online. Anja’s work reclaims the body, and questions why social channels like Instagram simultaneously reject the body, say censoring a nipple while gaining from a brutal fetishizing of it.



Anja Bing Vangsnes (b.1988 Oslo) is a textile artist and tapestry weaver. She also holds an MA in history from the University of Oslo.







“Handmade, Homewoven” Anja Bing Vangsnes

25-27 June, 2021

25.06 Opening at 6 pm -9 pm
26 -  27 Saturday and Sunday 12:00- 5:00pm.