Kaia Hugin’s series of video performances called “Motholic Mobbles”, is carried by an uncompromising physical presence. In these short films, Hugin, as an artist, appears as a mix between a slapstick mystic and a gymnastic version of the avant-garde film pioneer Maya Deren, who in the middle of the last century experimented with combining film, choreography and movement into a surrealistic and personal expression. In Hugin’s mobbles, the character, just as Deren’s female figures, goes through different ritual (compulsive) actions: she hangs, floats, moves backwards or bores herself down into the soil.

The series, produced from 2008, initially consists of six parts. In the 5th episode, Five Parts - a Motholic Mobble (part 5), Hugin introduces other bodies than her own for the first time. The mobbles’ unreal, but nevertheless highly physical and evidently painful, strictly choreographic patterns of movement, seem to want to melt the physical and real — the body, nature and gravity — with the logic of dreams and abstract experiences.

Arve Rød

www.kaiahugin.com

Artist-in-residence October 2012