Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5), 2011
Video HD, 8' 50"
KINOKINO Centre for Art and Film, Sandnes, Norway
Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5)
Kaia Hugin’s series of video performances, «Motholic Mobbles», is supported by an uncompromising bodily presence. In these short videos, Hugin appears as a mix of a slapstick-mystic and a gymnast version of the avant-garde filmmaker pioneer Maya Deren who, during the middle of the last century, without restraints experimented with combining film, choreography and movement in a surreal and highly personal expression. In Hugin’s «mobbles», the main character, as with Deren’s female figures, goes through a variety of (compulsive) acts: she hangs, levitates, floats, walks backwards, or bores herself into the ground. The ongoing series, produced since 2008, is for the time being made in six parts. In the fifth episode, Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5), Hugin introduces for the first time other bodies than her own. The scene is, as in the other «mobbles», a dark and ambivalent story; dreamlike and without a happy, although logical, ending. Declining body parts appear from the top of the screen: a leg, a head, a couple of arms, another leg – isolated and detached from one another they are hanging, like in a slaughterhouse, against a background black as the night. If they ever belonged to a fellowship with a common purpose, all rules and ideas about a greater whole now seem to be surpassed in an all-against-all struggle. Brutally and mercilessly the limbs attack each other, as if victims of reflexes from a deep and fateful subconsciousness. Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5), carries an apparent reference to Guernica, Picasso’s iconic motif of a Spain in civil war. Rather than to illustrate an obvious, outer tragedy of high political stature, Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5), touches upon a conflict in our irrational and dysfunctional self. The work is just as much inspired by B-culture’s excess in violent metaphors for sin, guilt and punishment by death. In this manner, it can also be described as a “soft splatter”, or a poetic horror movie, where the corporal fights itself in a battle that can never be won. Most of all, Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5), points out the fundamental fear of change, by the world around us, and by what lies our self nearest: our own psyche, and our own bodies.
Arve Rød (critic and writer)
Translation from Norwegian by Nils-Thomas Økland
Kaia Hugin (b.1975) is a Norwegian video artist who lives and works in Kolbotn, Norway. With a background in contemporary dance, she eventually moved onto contemporary art, and graduated with a MA in Fine Arts from Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Dept. Academy, in 2011.
Since her graduation, Hugin has exhibited extensively in both Norway and abroad, participating in group shows and festivals, as well as solo exhibitions. Hugin has established herself as a prominent artist in the Norwegian art scene. KINOKINO Centre for Art and Film is proud to present Kaia Hugin and her work, Five Parts – a Motholic Mobble (Part 5) as part of Artist’s Film International 2013.