PRESENTATION: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg-Death or Eternal Delight

Renowned for their surreal, immersive installations, the duo blends sculpture, stop-motion animation, and sound to craft evocative dreamscapes. Following their 2009 Silver Lion win at the Venice Biennale, the artists’ signature clay figures have expanded beyond the screen, emerging as physical, larger-than-life elements that command exhibition spaces.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galleri F 15 Archive

In “Death or Eternal Delight”, Nathalie Djurberg’s and Hans Berg’s first exhibition in Norway since  visitors are drawn into a fantastical garden brimming with glossy flowers, flapping birds, and gold-plated beavers. The atmosphere shifts from enchanting to chaotic, navigating a thin line between innocence and grotesquery reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.  Djurberg’s handcrafted clay animations, typically associated with children’s media, take on unsettling dimensions filled with bizarre, sexual, and violent undertones, while Berg’s layered soundscapes heighten this surreal atmosphere, immersing viewers in narratives that probe themes of lust, exploitation, and fear. Together, their work functions as a feverish dive into the subconscious — playful yet dark, mesmerising yet provocative. Mixing animation, sculpture and sound, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg create psychologically charged scenarios dealing with human and animalistic desires. Since 2001, Djurberg has developed a distinctive style of filmmaking, using clay animation to dramatise the basest of natural instincts from jealousy, revenge and greed, to submission and lust. Her partner, the musician and composer Hans Berg, conjures up the atmospheric sound effects and scores the hypnotic music for Djurberg’s animations and installations. In 2004 they began working closely together as a duo to create transgressive narratives rich in symbolic meaning and emotional reach, mining allegorical myths and grotesque, nightmarish visions in pieces, such as “Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt” (2004), “We Are Not Two, We Are One” (2008). The concept of a hidden garden came initially from Djurberg’s childhood memories of reading One Thousand and One Nights, in which Aladdin, hunting for treasure, found himself in an underground garden filled with fruits made of gemstones hanging from trees. In 2009, the artists created their first major work inspired by flora and fauna, a subversively surreal and immersive Garden of Eden, entitled “The Experiment”, for the 53rd Venice Biennial, for which they were awarded the Silver Lion for best emerging artists. The flower sculptures – some wall-mounted, some freestanding – have less in common with earlier cartoon-inflected uses of the motif, instead exhibiting a fragile beauty and an untamable, organic logic of their own. Constructed from mixed media – employing modelling clay, paint, fabric and resin – the sculptures recall real species of lily or orchid, as well as fantastical floral arrangements in other-worldly colours and forms. Flowers recur in Djurberg & Berg’s practice due to their abiding interest in the fleeting nature of human emotions and their shared symbolism for human themes of love, joy, desire, sadness and vulnerability. More recently, “Worship” (2016) and “Dark Side of the Moon” (2017). The artists’ interdisciplinary collaborations increasingly blur the cinematic, the sculptural and the performative in immersive environments that pair moving images and musical compositions with related set pieces or built objects.

Photo: Installation view “The Enchanted Garden” + “Like Beads on a String” (2022). From the exhibition «Death or Eternal Delight» by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, 8 March – 25 May 2025 at Galleri F 15, Moss, Norway. Photo by: Eivind Lauritzen, Galleri F 15

Info: Galleri F 15, Albyalléen 60, Moss, Norway, Duration: 8/3-25/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://gallerif15.no/