A Norwegian artist living in Britain has had an unsuccessful performance turned into a hit online video.
Hilde Krohn Huse, 26, decided to go to woodland near her home in Surrey and film her performance as part of an art project.
“This was a scene I wanted to include in a video. In my head it was supposed to be very simple: go up, hang, come down and go home,” said the artist in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.
The detail is that the artist would do this naked, in an isolated area, hanging by ropes from a tree branch, without any type of protection.
It was a very isolated place, a forest. The closest people were half a mile away.”
After hanging upside down by her leg for a little over a minute, to get the image that would be part of the project, Hilde tried to free herself from the rope, but the knot around her ankle was too tight.
After hanging by her leg to get the image that would be part of the project, Hilde tried to free herself, but the knot was too tight.
She spent several minutes trying to free herself – all of this being recorded on the video camera.
Hilde gets to climb the branch, but falls and ends up hanging upside down.
The artist recognizes that she did not prepare correctly.
“I don’t think I took it very seriously. I was like, ‘Hey guys, I’m going to go hang out in the woods, if I don’t come back in two hours, try to find me.’
After about ten minutes, Hilde starts screaming and asking her friends for help. But while no one listened to her requests, she continued to hang, naked, from the tree branch for half an hour. The camera battery ran out before that.
A friend came to free her from the branch.
Although the project didn’t turn out as she initially thought, Hilde decided to post the 11-minute video on her website and 500,000 people have already watched the artist’s struggle to free herself from the ropes.
“About half a million people (have already seen the video). So, it became a bit of a joke, a moment of a mistake in my life. It’s still creating a lot of conversation between different cultural aspects,” he said.
And Hilde’s “mistake” ended up fulfilling the original intention of becoming an art object. She entered the video, describing it as “a break between performance and reality”, in a prestigious competition and ended up being one of 37 artists selected – from more than 1,600 entries – for one of the most important exhibitions dedicated to new artists from Great Britain, Bloomberg New Contemporaries.
“I feel like it’s a success now, even though people are laughing at me. I think what they don’t realize is that I’m laughing with them too,” he added.
When asked if this is the image that will follow her for the rest of her life, the artist responds with a laugh:
“It’s okay, my naked body follows me around every day anyway!”
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