Pain, torment, mutilated body are elements present in the art of Norwegian fakir and artist Håvve Fjell, where pain functions as a form of transfer. With the help of pain, Fjell throws the spectator into contemporary issues of relation towards body and soul, “the body-dungeon” and various forms of social repression. (“The body becomes useful only if it is at the same time productive and subordinated…” — Foucault). The subject of repression, limitation and inhibition are integrated into a series of his performances entitled Quintet where he inhibits his body by plaster, needles and thread, hooks and a cage, and hurts himself with pieces of broken glass or employs traditional torture techniques.
Performance Sting was the culminating event of the opening day of the Break 21 Festival. This fakir, who came into the art scene with the urge for some other way of expression, held one performance from his Quintet series. In the performance he was sewn to the chair with his body, his left hand was sewn to his face, and right hand to his legs. Statement of this artist is that pain is a solution.
Using the strategy of torment Håvve Fjell does not discuss only physical torture, but rather — with the help of “difficult images” — he makes visible the techniques, principles, and strategies that various power structures employ to rule over the individual. Fjell’s representation of these processes is as much metaphor as it is a reality.
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Break21, the 6th international festival of emerging artists, was entitled Dead or Alive. The apocalyptic tone of the syntagm Dead or Alive involves the staging as well as practical thinking on the paradigms of the living, semi-living, semi-dead and dead. Their contemporary transformations have evolved from trends and changes in science and technology, reaching out also to religious and ideological concepts and psychological states.
