This artist's book gathers a collection of notes, excerpts, documentation,
artworks and interviews that documents Bugge's reading
experience of Conrad's Heart of Darkness as well as her own
artistic practice.
Initially published as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine
during 1899 before its combined publication in 1902, Heart of Darkness
tells the story of Marlow, an Englishman, who accepts a foreign assignment
from a Belgian trading company as captain of a ferry-boat in Africa. It was
inspired by Conrad's own travels up the Congo during the 1880s and, although
Conrad does not name the river, it is clear that the story is set in Congo
Free State, then the private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II, and that
Marlow has been employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more
pressing assignment is to return fellow ivory trader, Kurtz, to civilisation
as part of a cover-up. Of thoroughly European descent—his mother being
French and his father being English but with a German name—Kurtz has a
reputation throughout the region as a charismatic demigod to the tribes
surrounding the Inner Station where he keeps his ivory business. He is a man
of many talents, an excellent writer and artist with a potential in
politics. In his little house in the Inner Station, he keeps a painting he
has made of a white woman carrying a torch against an almost black
background. During his stay in Africa, he has become corrupt, and the last
sentence in his notebook stands as the central statement of Conrad's tale:
“Exterminate all the brutes”. At the point of Marlow's meeting with Kurtz,
the latter is almost dead from jungle fever (malaria). Marlow takes him down
the river, and Kurtz dies on the boat with the words “The Horror, The
Horror!” ringing in his ears.
The practice of Liv Bugge (born 1974 in Oslo, Norway, lives and works in
Oslo and Berlin) incorporates a range of different mediums, in which video
often plays an important part. Many of her works are situated in the
borderland between dreams and reality, perpetrator and victim, science
and fiction.
The work often enters into different power relations, and Bugge is
interested in aggression as both a constructive and destructive force in
society. During the past few years, she has been working with post-colonial
issues, in particular how the colonial system is explained and how one
relates to brutalities carried out in another place in space and time.
