On NBSL

Overview

Notions of performance have always been central to my practice. Early on I discovere that I was able to create stronger (truer) work by using my self than I could through the use of any other material. I performed live in front of an audience or spontaneously in the real world in relation to specific situations. To document the performances, I use Video/Super-SIl6mm. The use of documentation devices changed my approach to the way I performed. I began to perform for the camera. The product became the film/video rather than the act itself.

I began to work with computer editing. I realised that once the documentation material was in a computer, it translated to another level. Through the process of editing I could get the character (always performed by me) to do superhuman things. A distance formed between the character and me. The character was like a puppet and I the puppeteer, the intriguing division that manifested itself in this approach encouraged me to give the character it's own name: NBSL.

Since then I have continued to expand the influence of NBSL. Over the last year people's awareness of NBSL has grown. I fear that being categorised too early in one's career can be damaging for one's practice and I feel I should continue to experiment with my. approach to live arts as long as possible. This is what NBSL would say and I have come to accept his word as also mine.

Niko/aj Bendix Skyum Larsen (NBSL)
PL

Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen is a London-based Danish artist who uses low-tech equipment and simple narratives to make sophisticated statements about technology's impact on physical boundaries and desires.

In an age when people are continually striving to keep up with technological advances, it is helpful to be reminded that the most rudimentary and possibly oldest tricks of storytelling, namely repetition and exaggeration can be coupled with the simplest editing techniques to make possible that which cannot happen every day.

NBSL is an alter ego for the artist; he is a character who allows Nikolaj to experience in the virtual space of video what is not possible in physical reality. While it is Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen who writes, directs, films, acts in, and edits the work, it is NBSL who becomes the work, proving that through stubborn persistence and theoretically neat editing, anything is possible, once captured in frame.

Rebecca Ward