Single-channel video, 21:23 min, with sound
Sound by Jens Balder

The proverbial ’land of milk and honey’ is a place we all regularly imagine. Even if we don’t picture it as a place, we certainly call upon the metaphor when we want to describe something as particularly harmonious. Maybe it’s a state of mind or a distinct kind of mental harmony, or an abstract quality attributed to an experience or an imagined past; but in the core of these similes always lie a semantic content drawn from the fat and nurturing character of milk, reminiscent of the mother’s love, and the viscous and gelatinous pleasures of honey, with its dual meaning of sugary nectar on the one hand, and affectionate nickname between lovers on the other. The land of milk and honey is always a land of plenty, of abundance and of irreversible sweetness and smoothness. But can it overflow? Can we suffocate on its thick rivers of syrup and affection?

In a symbolic and ironic tribute to this age-old figure of speech, Katja Bjørn’s Honey transposes it into an abstract place. The single-channel video installation depicts a rectangular chamber with a glass wall, through which a naked woman is shown showering herself in a thick stream of warm honey. At first she is as surprised at this strange scene as the viewer, but she soon finds pleasure in the cascading nectar, rubbing it deep into her hair and skin, at first with measured and careful movements, later with a less restrained enthusiasm. Because of the enclosed nature of the chamber, however, the honey soon starts to fill it up, gradually enveloping and obscuring the woman’s body. Her enthusiasm soon turns to a kind of bewildered detachment, which eventually gives way to a burgeoning desperation, as the absurdity of the situation outgrows the sensual delight in the honey, and a sickeningly sweet death creeps silently up towards her head, drowning her in a silent embrace of decadent and deadly abundance. As the honey rises, she is transformed into an element of pure excess, of pure indulgence, in a paradoxical reversal, as the pleasurable transmutes into death.

In this way, Bjørn’s work represents how an abundant stream of sweetness can transform from nourishing affection into suffocating nausea. The woman in the honey tank is experiencing the sneaking disaster of suffocation within the sphere of pleasure, the point of excess where the pleasurable is unmasked as its own opposite. The land of milk and honey in this literal interpretation exposes itself as something utterly absurd, something that is essentially too much of the good thing; the praxis of excess becomes a lie in-and-of-itself, as abundance doubles back on itself, and drowns its ever-thirsty searchers in the thick, glutinous stream of that lie itself. In the end, however, the woman now floating ominously as a shadow inside the pool of her own excess, a strange beauty manifests itself. The woman has now, in a sense, died, but that death immediately reverses itself into a kind of pre-natal state, as the woman’s body now, like an egg cell in the calm darkness of the womb, falls silent, waiting for the cycle of life and death, milk and honey, to reboot.

Among others part of the exhibition EAT ME at Trapholt, Kolding.