“Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things”, declares George Bataille in The Solar Anus¹. Rather than a hierarchy of high and low, Bataille envisions the universe as powered by rotation in a manner that makes each thing an equally valid point of origination in an eroticized organic excess of energy. A cyclical Groundhog Day universe has recently been proposed by scientists who believe ‘a big crunch’ to be followed by a new ‘big bang’ in an endless loop.
    In Infinite Loop, Persson and Hagen explore the idea of a cyclic universe, where each point can equally well be a starting point or an endpoint, as an analogy for human self-reflection. Using repetition and looped technologies, the artists asks whether self-reflection is like being trapped between two mirrors; always a reflection of a reflection. Perhaps the image of rotation goes beyond analogy? What if there is only one big rotation with no point of separation between internal and external, man or nature, who or what is then the agency behind thought?
    Using moving image, sculpture, photography and drawing as points of departure, individual work connects within an invisible Indra’s net that can only be navigated by way of association. The urge for self-reflection and the dichotomy of observer and observed that it produces, can appear so frantic that it caves in on itself. Introspection and extrospection become part of one self-reflective operation with endless points of individual reflexivity.

¹ Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, Selected Writings 1927 – 1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985).

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