Julie Robiolle 2024

After my last discussion with Bror Ida, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the taste of milk. It’s been two decades since it last touched my tongue in its purest form. The only thing I could capture was its nauseating smell, its silver shine and a bunch of images (in no specific order: a grazing cow, a woman in a tank top holding the milk way too high and obviously failing to aim at her own mouth, a smiling farmer, a dead calf). As with Goya’s Nature morte à la tête de moutons, Bror’s WHITE M / U / U Slavught (01013) installation is a study in fragmentation, specifically the fragmentation of meaning and dignity through death.

The multi-media installation is composed of sculptures, images, a sound installation, and a video. All offer different sensory experiences that are only slices of the real. A furless cut cloven hoof, metallic devices taken out of the farm, elusive textures, and sexual flesh on glass. Each comes with a side of milk, in glasses mostly, but also flowing against a tongue or stagnating in a boot made out of cow dung. Its white blandness is simply here to remind us of its ubiquity: an open invitation guiding us back to the sensory experience. We are forced to taste the violence of this fragmentation; of meanings and of bodies, of mother, whore and calf, of the feeding and the sexual forced to live in different realities.

Bror Ida’s sculptural works give you more than what they represent. They creep into your nervous system and elicit danger, desires and disgust all at once. WHITE M / U / U Slavught (01012), which was last presented at Tensta

Konsthall on the occasion of The Vaginal Davis University of the damaged and gifted gives infinitely running milk on a lusty tongue, Sisyphean lapping, ingenuity of a calf feeding. The slurp, the shine, the roaring of the motor all call to primitive desires and images; a nervous backdoor disclosing all the contradictory meanings of the maternal liquid/ sexual fluid/ death residue.