Growing up in a family that participated in sled dog racing, the Norwegian artist Liv Bugge spent frequent time in a dog yard, where she had upwards of sixty huskies as peers and friends. Through these animals, she learned a way of living based on collaboration, non-verbal communication, and an interest in the complexity of overlapping life cycles, all of which she tests the bounds of in her art. As such, throughout Bugge’s work, collaboration is posed alongside power structures and systems of control, conversation and dialogue are envisioned through senses such as touch, and the mechanisms that separate human from non-human life and structured society from wildness are made complex. Bugge’s video installation PLAY (2019) presents 16mm film footage recorded with a pack of Siberian huskies, exhibited on wooden dog houses retrofitted with projections. Shot onsite at a snow-covered Nordic dog yard with the help of the artist’s family, huskies, as opposed to humans, are the focus of the work: they sit still, jump, play, and sniff. Shown in undramatic and everyday fashion, the lives of these huskies suggest a different model of survival than that of aggression and strength; an unspoken collaborative relationship between humans and animals becomes the determinant of content and composition in the work.
Madeline Weisburg
