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Henriksen Guri Guri

Guri Guri Henriksen’s short films are shot somewhere between the kitchen sink and the bathroom of her modest middle-class flat near the centre of Oslo. Her medium is food – minced meat and herrings, beeswax and ghee – which takes a life of its own, and sometimes assumes threatening forms, in a humorous, and distinctly surreal,enactment of the nineteenth century philosopher, Ludwing Feuerbach’s proposition, that man ist, wass man isst (we are what we eat). Her obsession with this theme found expression in her breakthrough installation. “Blood Eggs”, which she exhibited at the French cultural Centre in 1998 and has recreated for the inaugural showing of Boundless, in Oslo. This derived, in part, from her reading of Georges Bataille’s well known The Story Of the Eye, which explores the boundaries of sexual taboos, particularly, the dream scenario with Simone and the eggs, in Chapter 6, in which the narrator describes how, Upon my asking what the word urinate reminder her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun, the sun. And egg? A calf’s eye, because of the color of the head and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball. The eye, she said, was egg-shaped. She asked me to promise that when we go outdoors, I would fling eggs into the sunny air and break them with shots from my gun…