Tori Wrånes is a Norwegian artist and vocalist born in Kristiansand in 1978, now working between Oslo and Kristiansand. Her transmedial practice combines performance, sculpture, video, installation, sound, costume and architecture. Voice often functions as a physical material: she creates scores for bodies in motion, performers suspended in space, altered instruments and sculptural figures that sing or emit signals. Costumes, prosthetics and hybrid creatures destabilise familiar ideas of the human body, while invented rituals and a self-developed “troll language” allow communication to move beyond ordinary speech. Her dreamlike environments draw on Nordic folklore, queer identity, ecological change and the possibility of living outside fixed social categories.
In 2026 Wrånes represents Norway in the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, alongside Klara Kristalova and Benjamin Orlow. The collaborative exhibition How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? runs from 9 May to 22 November. Wrånes contributes Human Lace, a monumental installation of interlocking headless figures that passes through the pavilion’s architecture and suggests a transformation into birds. A kinetic figure repeatedly moves along a tree in Erotic poetry by the architect, nature and me, while an hourly foghorn turns sound into a navigational presence. These works extend her interest in metamorphosis, endurance and coexistence, treating architecture as an active element rather than a neutral container.