Hege Tapio

FUTURE MANIFESTOS
KJØPMANNSGATA UNG KUNST, 9. APRIL  – 31. MAI 2026
Åpning: 9. april 2026 kl.18.00
Kuratorer: Zane Cerpina, Espen Gangvik

Trilogy of Transformations: Humanfuel / Humanoil / Black Gold

Our era is defined by extraction, what was once taken from the ground is now drawn from life itself. 

This trilogy brings together three interconnected works that collapse distinctions between resource and subject, economy and intimacy, value and vulnerability. Presented as exalted objects, Humanfuel, Humanoil, and Black Gold – they document the offerings from a lived life, matter, and process. 

In the effort of realizing these works – the artist has endured the pain of extracting her own bodyfat, gone through processing of body matter through thermal heating, reduction, and chemical transformation. 

In unity, these works profess how bodies, living matter, and biological processes are rendered measurable, convertible, and valuable within contemporary economic and technological systems. Exposing and provoking the dominant logic that reorganizes how life is perceived, governed, and transformed.

The trilogy traces a trajectory from body to fuel, from value to commodity, from intimacy to industry. Across these artworks, the human body is repositioned into the manmade value cycle as a site of material extraction and transformation through real biochemical processes, exploring the human body as both a biological entity and economic frontier. The works trace a trajectory from industrial conversion to symbolic offering. Across Humanfuel, Humanoil, and Black Gold, bodily substances of human fat and urine have become processed through biochemical, alchemical, and ritual processes into fuel, oil, and “black gold.” Operating at the intersection of performance, biotechnology, and critical speculation, they stage transformations that dismiss the conceptual distance between the human organism and the infrastructures that power contemporary life.

What begins as a provocation disguised as a speculative biotech venture in Humanfuel evolves into the refinement of anointment by human-derived oil in Humanoil, and culminates in the alchemical distillation of urine into a dense, petroleum-like substance in Black Gold. Together, they collapse distinctions between body and resource, waste and value, life and commodity. They expose a disturbing continuity; the same extractive mindset that has turned ancient life into fossil fuels now turns toward living bodies as reservoirs of value. The biochemical processes that sustain life are reframed through economic and technological logics that prioritize efficiency, conversion, and yield.

The trilogy serves as the artistic testament, influenced by a nation shaped by petroleum wealth, reflecting on extractivism not only as an environmental issue, but as a cultural and psychological condition. In this context, metabolism becomes political: the biochemical processes that sustain life are reframed through systems of optimization, yield, and exchange.

By materializing these transformations, the trilogy confronts viewers with the unsettling question of where the boundaries of resource extraction truly lie. At the same time, it is provokingly opening a space for rethinking transformation itself, emphasising the need of a shift in value and mindset, towards a future of relational and ethical process grounded in care, interdependence, and respect for the living.

Living systems do not function through extraction. They function through metabolism – through cycles, limits, and exchange. We stand at a threshold between two value systems: One that converts life into resource, and one that understands life as relation. These artworks belong to that threshold.

Humanfuel [2008-2016]

Humanfuel explores the transformation of human body fat into biodiesel as a speculative and provocative artistic investigation into energy, embodiment, and resource imaginaries. The project originated with a conceptual framework built around a fictional company, Lipotechnica, which claimed to produce biofuel from human liposuction fat. For the realized iteration of Humanfuel in 2016, the artist collaborated with researchers and medical professionals to undertake a laboratory-based process in which human adipose tissue – harvested from the artist’s own body, was processed through standard biodiesel production techniques. 

Going through a surgical procedure, having body fat removed, processed, and ultimately transformed into biofuel, became the staging of a speculative yet materially grounded act of “extreme self-mining.”
The transformation of adipose tissue into biodiesel became a speculative material process that collapsed the distinction between body and fuel, prompting questions about how humans imagine themselves within ecological and technological systems.

The work makes literal a metaphor that underpins industrial modernity: the conversion of organic matter into energy. By placing her own body within this chain of extraction and refinement, the artist collapses the distance between personal biology and global energy systems. The body is no longer only a subject that consumes fuel, but a substance that can be rendered into it. Humanfuel exposes the violence and absurd logic of a culture that treats life as convertible matter. It confronts viewers with the physical and ethical cost of a worldview in which value is measured in energetic output. At the same time, the work foregrounds vulnerability, pain, and embodiment, in insisting that the “resource” is not abstract, but lived.

Humanoil – The Last Oil [2020]

Humanoil: The Last Oil is a multimedia artwork and performative ritual that continues the artist’s long-term artistic inquiry into human materials, extraction, and value. Building on the earlier Humanfuel project, in which body fat was transformed into biodiesel, Humanoil focuses on the rendering and use of human body fat as a consumable oil with historical, cultural, and symbolic resonance.

For Humanoil, the artist harvested a substantial amount of her own adipose tissue and rendered it into an applicable oil, drawing from both historical practices and fictional ritual frameworks. This produced a substance presented as an extreme luxury product that evokes long traditions of oil in myth, magic, medicine, and sacrifice. The use of human oil has historical precedents in various cultural and medicinal contexts, including traditional healing and ritual anointing, and Humanoil engages precisely with these layered meanings. By rendering her own bodily oil into an object of exchange, care, or cosmetic use, the project invites reflection on how cultural narratives shape the value of bodily materials, and what it means to reposition ourselves as both biological subjects and material producers.

Humanoil extends the material trajectory of Humanfuel into the symbolic and ritual realm. Oil distilled from the artist’s body fat is presented in a ceremonial performance where participants are invited to receive the substance in an act that oscillates between sacrament, luxury commodity, and incantation. 

Humanoil reactivates these associations while addressing contemporary extractivism and ecological crisis. It asks not only how we use resources, but how we might metabolize inherited guilt, denial, and dependency. Transformation here becomes psychological, cultural, and ethical.

Black Gold [2019]
Made in collaboration with Mark Lipton and Marta de Menezes. 

Black Gold completes the trilogy by connecting transformation of body matter to the broader cultural and economic history, recalling a time when substances such as urine were central resources in chemical, medicinal, and industrial practices.

In Black Gold, urine was reduced by prolonged heating, resulting in a black, highly concentrated residue, through a collaborative laboratory process. The work situates bodily waste within a lineage of material practices that interrogate value, transformation, and the cultural meanings attached to biological matter. Historically, urine played a central role in alchemy and early chemistry: it was used as a source of ammonia for cleaning and dyeing, in tanning hides, in the production of gunpowder and fertilizers, and as a reagent in chemical experiments. By referencing this history, Black Gold reactivates a long-standing tradition in which bodily fluids were treated as valuable, utilitarian, and transformative materials. In this context, urine becomes a contemporary “black gold.”

The work reflects on value: how certain materials come to be seen as precious, powerful, and worth extracting at any cost. By associating this symbolism with a substance derived from the human body, Black Gold exposes the unsettling convergence of economic abstraction and biological life. The piece invites viewers to reconsider what we call “wealth,” and what forms of life are sacrificed in its pursuit.

By transforming a substance culturally coded as waste into a material resembling petroleum, Black Gold destabilizes the boundary between discard and value. It challenges viewers to reconsider what is deemed useless, what is made precious, and how systems of science, industry, and culture assign worth to matter, including the matter of our own bodies.