My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre. (Donna Haraway;Primate Visions(377))

One gets the feeling that everything is connected in Liv Bugge’s work. History is part of the present; others are part of us.
Her practice incorporates a range of different mediums, where video often plays an important part. Her newest work “Once you go black” is a video-installation consisting of three different, but thematically intertwined films. Like her earlier works, these are situated in the borderland between dreams/reality, perpetrator/victim and science/fiction. The constructions that surround the films are primitive and unfinished and reminiscent of places of sacrifice.

The action in the video Hyperborean-room ballads (2008) takes place in a hotel room in Antwerp. During a telepathy séance, Bugge establishes contact with her fathers lead-dog. A Congolese animal interpreter conducts the séance. The answers the interpreter provides tell us as much about herself as about the artist. The title of the work alludes to the myth of the Hyperborean people, who, according to Greek mythology, were a spiritual tribe who lived in perpetual sunshine at the North Pole. The further one retreated from the North Pole, the darker it became. As darkness descended, degeneration set in culminating in its material centre at the South Pole. In modern times, such ideas have been exploited in racist cultural theories and rhetoric.

The second video We had no road (2008), is partly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem Adriane’s Complaint. The poem refers to an event when Nietzsche was fifteen. While out wandering in the forest he met a hunter and fainted shortly thereafter. This intense meeting would often return in his dreams, and in his later writings he refers to this hunter as his god. The dream-like atmosphere of the film promotes the notion of the forest as a site of rituals, hunting and magic, where there is a constant shift between the hunter and the hunted.

Exterminate all brutes (2009) is the third film to be edited into this installation, which is partly based on a visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Brussels. The museum has the largest collection of Central African culture. The cellar is a temporal document, which can also be seen as a repository for hunting trophies and death. A text on how to open and clean septic wounds accompanies the images.

The three videos circle around post-colonial issues, forming a meditation on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1904). There is a political brutality and consciousness in Bugge’s work that suggests a desire for art to investigate the boundaries of the society we live in. The colonial structures that Conrad describes in his novel are as valid today. Europe’s righteous self-image must be reassessed. Beneath our so-called Christian compassion we are not as good as we claim to be.
           

The installation’s mix of post-colonialism, nature, animal, myth and magic creates a condition where we veer between truth and fiction, and where the videos becomes sites for magical and psychological states. The exploration of these alternative ways of thinking function as a critique of an ingrained state of mind, which does not allow room for anything that is at odds with modern science, learned behaviour that cements traditional value and is based on the desire to maintain control.
                                    Stina Högkvist (Curator Momentum 2009/Favoured Nations)