The oeuvre of image and sound artist Peter Bogers includes a number of video installations which seem to be related in form and content, namely, Portret (1992), Survival (1992) and Sacrifice (1994). In all three of these relatively small, elusive and intimate installations, small glass show cases are incorporated, in which minute video images of parts of a face can be seen, enlarged and distorted by lenses. In Portret, you see images of a supine profile: a bent tube, which seems to extend from the mouth, ends just above the eye. You are witness to a cycle in which saliva from the mouth constantly drips into the eye. Survival provides a view from above into a wide-open mouth, a gaping hole in which the teeth are displayed menacingly and water bubbles in and out. Both works seem to be ritualized expressions of highly personal preoccupations and self-reflections, in which the viewer becomes involved as a voyeur and witness.

In Sacrifice, too, a mouth is being filled up with water. On the floor stands a small, glass, show case, containing a minuscule black-and-white monitor whose screen is not directed forward, but straight upward, so that the viewer looks onto it from above. Two lenses are placed above the monitor, which enlarge or distort the video image, depending on the viewers' position. What you see is a seamless image loop of an open mouth, filmed from above, and surrounded by water. First you see the water rising slowly, then the mouth filling up until it is completely immersed, and subsequently the water going down, but the mouth remaining filled. Eventually, the pharynx collapses and the mouth is empty again. These four phases are repeated ad infinitum and, at the appropriate moments, are accompanied by soft swallowing sounds coming from a small loudspeaker at the bottom of the show case.

Behind the show case, on the wall, there is a large black-and-white photo showing what must have been the set where the video images were recorded. The viewer sees a man, the artist, lying naked in a grimy, dilapidated bathtub, his face almost completely under water. A microphone hangs above his open mouth, and the camera and accessories are suspended above the bath.

Together with the video, the photo represents the process and the result: the artist drinking up the bathtub. It seems to be a resigned, stoical immersion in water, in which it is the elevated and passive position, which you as viewer are forced to assume by the form of the installation, that makes this spectacle so disconcerting. The action of the lenses enhances the feeling that you are spying on the implementation of an intimate and mysterious process, a ceremony which you cannot get a grip on. Its effect is bewildering and alienating, rather than clarifying and elucidating. What is this ritual, sacrifice or self-sacrifice, and in whose honour, that we, the viewers, are the passive witnesses to in Sacrifice?

Jorinde Seijdel