Michael Kvium

Michael Kvium’s turn to video emerged as a continuation of his early performance practice with Performancegruppen Værst, founded in 1985 together with Christian Lemmerz, Sonny Tronborg, and Ingunn Jørgstad. In these performances, the body became the medium: actions were performed without words, often pushing physical and psychological limits. This experience of endurance, repetition, and confrontation would later inform his visual language, extending into video as a medium where time unfolds independently of the viewer.

The two videos presented here unfold across pairs of screens, placing the viewer between opposing figures. With static cameras and no cuts, actions unfold in real time with an almost pictorial stillness. The clown-like figures Mr Black and Mr White emerged from Kvium’s black-and-white paintings of the mid-1990s. Dressed in opposing black and white uniforms, they appear as performers, patients, and archetypal figures, stripped of individual expression. Neither can be understood as right or wrong; instead, they occupy opposite positions within the same field, locked in mirroring and reversal.

In Attack & Defence, a white-clad clown sits in a room filled with eggs. He suddenly rises, crushes one, and returns to his chair. The gesture repeats until all eggs are destroyed, transforming the room into a slippery residue of yolk and shell. What begins as potential life becomes fragments of what could have been, and with the final act, time seems to stop.

In Myth, the act of drawing itself becomes a performance. A figure works on a surface, constructing an image of another human figure while appearing at the same time as both maker and subject. The drawing is not presented as a finished representation but as something continually produced through gesture, repetition, and physical presence. The title Myth suggests the construction of an image or narrative as an ongoing act: something is created before us, only to be transformed by its mirrored counterpart.

The confrontation between the screens places the viewer between opposing forces. Attack becomes defense, black becomes white, and action becomes repetition. The figures are not opposites but two poles of the same condition, where meaning constantly shifts.

This logic of inversion continues in the new paintings shown alongside the videos. Here, black and white are not merely formal opposites but coexist within the same figures. Clothing, objects, faces, and backgrounds are divided and reversed, producing pairs in which one image seems to contain the possibility of its opposite. In the smaller works, the division enters the figure itself, splitting the face between contrasting identities. The paintings suggest that positive and negative are not fixed states but two sides of the same image.