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GLOBAL ‘HEART’ CIRCULATION
ARKEN Museum of Modern Art / Denmark 2002
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Video installation



The installation, custom made for the Arken Museum’s monumental
Axis, visualizes society as a pulsing heart chamber that has the rhythm
and sound of a ticking bomb – a reactor bursting with energy affecting
life and death.

A red liquid bursts forth in pulsating spurts from the end of a diving
board and into a reactor-like, circular, industrial 4x4 meter container
emitting a digitally treated heartbeat. Cylinder pipes under each of the
three speakers gives you a look at a digitally processed video.

The video is of a pulsating human heart edited in with a hectically pulsating
universe, merging whirling images of blood and rivers. Organic
life alternates with images of the technological universe of atomic energy,
artificial hearts and chemical liquid chemicals accompanied by the
computer’s controlling and regulating, universal heartbeat. The heart
beats 100,000 times a day, sending out 15,000 liters of blood to supply
the body’s 300 billion cells with oxidized blood.


*
The best and most timely contribution is B.v.H.H.S’s ‘Global Heart
Circulation’. In a giant assemblage of chemical drums, circulatory system
of red fluid, video monitors and diving board high up under the ceiling,
the artist thematizes the destructive and inhuman consequences of
the hi-tech development. The installation’s rawness matches the unpolished
surroundings of Arken, engaging the viewer visually and emotionally
by video projections scored to the beating of a bared human heart
and the risk of being soaked in red liquid. Like B.v.H.H.S’s exhibition of
clones at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, in fall 1999, the
art is agitating and pertinent. Aesthetics is subordinated to art as a platform
for communication.
.
- Politiken / Newspaper / Annette Brodersen -


* Most dominant and dramatic is B.v.H.H.S’s pulsating Global ‘Heart’
Circulation. Blood-red fluid is pumped from a big, shiny tank in the
center through arteries and a circulatory system of bright drums of
bile-green toxic waste. The blood flow terminates under the ceiling and
pulses back down into the tank. It is a dramatic and a monumental
statement.

- Information / Newspaper / Gertrud Købke Sutton -
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