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Tine Bech is a
visual artist, researcher and educator who work
with interactive installations and public art.
She was born in Denmark and now lives and works
in London, UK.
Bechs practice is concerned with how we engage with our immediate environment. The artwork is intentionally accessible through the use of location and materials and often ‘hums and reacts with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Projects have centred on the use of interactive electronics and location tracking technology, urban spaces and environmental elements such as gravity, water, sound and light to develop spaces where participations, play, and experiences of immersion take place.
Bechs practice is concerned with how we engage with our immediate environment. The artwork is intentionally accessible through the use of location and materials and often ‘hums and reacts with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Projects have centred on the use of interactive electronics and location tracking technology, urban spaces and environmental elements such as gravity, water, sound and light to develop spaces where participations, play, and experiences of immersion take place.
Her public art
is site-sensitive (often in unexpected places)
and aims to challenge our common assumptions
about public space and its use. The work
questions public behavior (don’t touch in
galleries, don’t play/run in public
spaces) and encourages interaction, play and
collaboration, whether between large groups or
in intimate interactions between the viewer and
the artwork. Bech also enjoys collaboration and
has worked with engineers, scientists and sound
artists to explore new forms of expression, at
the edge of the disciplines.
Bechs use of interactive technology addresses the meeting between the digital and the physical. Her work explores the body moving through the environment that it is immersed in. The body is the membrane through which we must necessarily relate to the world. However, the borderline between the body and world is not sharply defined, instead they are entwined in a constant dialogue. This dialogue is an important part of the work.
Art is for everybody. It's just not everybody who knows it.
“Everything is secretly alive in Tine Bech’s work: shoes, bridges, streetlights, balloons and coloured blobs. They hum and react with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Boundless in Space is a pink blob looking a little like a cushion on wheels that moves and clicks when you come close to it. Echidna is a black wiry sculpture, emitting sounds in response to your touch, which was inspired by the Australian hedgehog of the same name. Coloured lights are activated as people pass on the bridge beneath in Tracing Light. A large red blob accompanies the artist on a bicycle tour of Toronto Island in another work. And in Mememe, visitors move around in flamboyant sculptural shoes creating sound compositions in a gallery space. Bech’s sculptures and installations are full of bright colours evoking sunlight and playgrounds”
Tracey Warr, Watery Looks, Open Studio Catalogue, visiting artist exhibition, Toronto, Canada 2009
"Tine Bech's work Mememe proposes a phenomenological appreciation of art that activates the whole body and all the senses - where the artwork becomes something more than just a visual and intellectual experience."
Marie Nipper: Mememe, On the Edge, Catalogue.
"Tine Bech's work Mememe, it is the relationship between technical possibilities and man as a sensing creature that is examined."
Annette Damgaard, On the Edge. Catalogue.
"Where does the body end and where does our surrounding world begin? These were the two questions that resounded inside my head after seeing Tine Bech's interactive sound installation 'Floating Field 2'
...It is the weightlessness of the sculptural construction that makes the work sensitive to the slightest influence. This sensitivity is important as it highlights that the body is capable of affecting the world, without being in direct contact with it. The installation signifies the bodys indefinable boundaries; there is a life between body and world that is not immediately intelligible. In other words Tine Bech unites body and world in a formless intersection on the edge form.
...In a way the installation almost has Buddhist elements in the way it attempts to go beyond the classic dualistic dichotomy: Body and Mind are interdependent. Hans Christian Andersen wrote about this 200 years ago and Tine Bech now re-ignites the debate - in case anyone should have forgotten the old poet."
Rene Lundgaard, Floating Field 2, Review.
"Instead, an artistic language has emerged which uses the medium of everyday - the canvas of old, the objects from our daily existence - to tease out a different meaning, engendering: that sense of a very special place where the atmosphere is about the work and the viewer, a contemplative space."
Christine Kapteijn, Outside Gets Inside, Catalogue.
At an exhibition in Brighton a child flung himself upon one of her sculptures, as if it were a giant pillow. Bech watched in horror and fury, shortly followed by relief when it emerged unbroken from underneath the offending boy. But she concedes to being flattered – he had merely succumbed to the urge that she aims to elicit.
Bech calls the viewers’ interaction with the objects ‘playing’ and feels strongly that fun should be inherent in her artwork.
Lucy Manning ‘Features Tine Bech’
"Through an exploration of materials and materiality Bech address the body's languageless experience of the world. The approach is not logocentric. She addresses the gap between sensuous, bodily experience and its interpretation in words and categories."
Tracey Warr, Materialisation, Catalogue
Bechs use of interactive technology addresses the meeting between the digital and the physical. Her work explores the body moving through the environment that it is immersed in. The body is the membrane through which we must necessarily relate to the world. However, the borderline between the body and world is not sharply defined, instead they are entwined in a constant dialogue. This dialogue is an important part of the work.
Art is for everybody. It's just not everybody who knows it.
“Everything is secretly alive in Tine Bech’s work: shoes, bridges, streetlights, balloons and coloured blobs. They hum and react with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Boundless in Space is a pink blob looking a little like a cushion on wheels that moves and clicks when you come close to it. Echidna is a black wiry sculpture, emitting sounds in response to your touch, which was inspired by the Australian hedgehog of the same name. Coloured lights are activated as people pass on the bridge beneath in Tracing Light. A large red blob accompanies the artist on a bicycle tour of Toronto Island in another work. And in Mememe, visitors move around in flamboyant sculptural shoes creating sound compositions in a gallery space. Bech’s sculptures and installations are full of bright colours evoking sunlight and playgrounds”
Tracey Warr, Watery Looks, Open Studio Catalogue, visiting artist exhibition, Toronto, Canada 2009
"Tine Bech's work Mememe proposes a phenomenological appreciation of art that activates the whole body and all the senses - where the artwork becomes something more than just a visual and intellectual experience."
Marie Nipper: Mememe, On the Edge, Catalogue.
"Tine Bech's work Mememe, it is the relationship between technical possibilities and man as a sensing creature that is examined."
Annette Damgaard, On the Edge. Catalogue.
"Where does the body end and where does our surrounding world begin? These were the two questions that resounded inside my head after seeing Tine Bech's interactive sound installation 'Floating Field 2'
...It is the weightlessness of the sculptural construction that makes the work sensitive to the slightest influence. This sensitivity is important as it highlights that the body is capable of affecting the world, without being in direct contact with it. The installation signifies the bodys indefinable boundaries; there is a life between body and world that is not immediately intelligible. In other words Tine Bech unites body and world in a formless intersection on the edge form.
...In a way the installation almost has Buddhist elements in the way it attempts to go beyond the classic dualistic dichotomy: Body and Mind are interdependent. Hans Christian Andersen wrote about this 200 years ago and Tine Bech now re-ignites the debate - in case anyone should have forgotten the old poet."
Rene Lundgaard, Floating Field 2, Review.
"Instead, an artistic language has emerged which uses the medium of everyday - the canvas of old, the objects from our daily existence - to tease out a different meaning, engendering: that sense of a very special place where the atmosphere is about the work and the viewer, a contemplative space."
Christine Kapteijn, Outside Gets Inside, Catalogue.
At an exhibition in Brighton a child flung himself upon one of her sculptures, as if it were a giant pillow. Bech watched in horror and fury, shortly followed by relief when it emerged unbroken from underneath the offending boy. But she concedes to being flattered – he had merely succumbed to the urge that she aims to elicit.
Bech calls the viewers’ interaction with the objects ‘playing’ and feels strongly that fun should be inherent in her artwork.
Lucy Manning ‘Features Tine Bech’
"Through an exploration of materials and materiality Bech address the body's languageless experience of the world. The approach is not logocentric. She addresses the gap between sensuous, bodily experience and its interpretation in words and categories."
Tracey Warr, Materialisation, Catalogue