Hugo Ljungbäck is a video artist, film curator, and media scholar. His videos regularly explore queer subjectivities, oversexed bodies, sexual abuse, and coercion, and have screened at national and international film festivals and galleries, from London to New York and Beijing to Buenos Aires. His research focuses on the intersection of video art, surveillance, labor, and queer cinema, and his writing has been published in international journals. He is an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Chair of the UWM Moving Image Society, and a programmer for the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.

artist statement

Seeing images of queer people telling queer stories can be incredibly powerful for people struggling with accepting their own identities, but can also begin to change people’s hostile perceptions, start conversations, and inspire acceptance. Through my filmmaking, I hope to incite discussion about representation, increase visibility of issues facing the queer community, and resonate with and inspire audiences to take social action. I aim to counter mainstream and stereotypical images of gay youth by regularly exploring queer subjectivities and telling underrepresented stories about sexual abuse and coercion, offering intimate portraits of the hidden, the often unflattering, and the unseen. My work is often durational, gestural, and performative, and I often make myself the subject of my camera. As such, I blur the boundaries between documentation and reenactment, and ideas of authenticity, reality, and artifice are always at stake.