Over the last few years Kjetil Kausland has given his interest in cage fighting, or MMA, a public presentation through the photo project "No Holds Barred" (2004-2007). In 2008 he took part in a professional MMA-match himself, staged as the performance "No Más" at Teatergarasjen in Bergen (NO).

In "No Holds Barred" fights are frozen, and the images invite us to take a closer look at where one fighter's body ends and another begins. We are invited to try to identify with the physical and mental forces at play. Their gazes are vulnerable, naked, in a state of exhaustion, they are seemingly not the eyes of a man; they are almost animalistic. The fighters seem to be in a state of concentration beyond thinking, impossible to translate into words.

The projects are united by a fundamental generosity and empathy towards the emotions and experiences of the fighters, and the result of having now once made himself the object of the gaze, is that the more recent photographic works on cage fighters has taken on a perhaps darker and more direct attitude. His insistence on investigating something to the point of exhaustion is one of the things that has been the most impressive in Kausland’s work.

This feature is sponsored by LAUTOM contemporary, Oslo. To visit the gallery website, please click here.