ART-PRESENTATION: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
The stop-motion animation technique of claymation is most commonly associated with children’s entertainment, which only serves to heighten the peculiar power of Djurberg’s work. The artist executes the time-consuming process of the animation on her own, with composer Hans Berg providing the musical scores. Her videos and sculptures dramatize difficult social and political issues with unsettling directness, while her careful hand construction and painterly use of color infuse the works with a disconcerting beauty that underscores their emotional impact.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
Nathalie Djurberg sees herself primarily as a painter but creates videos with stop motion animation. The work is done in close dialogue with Hans Berg, whose music adds layers of moods and meanings. Their collaboration is intuitive, with no storyboards or written scripts. The work is profoundly original, with many links to other performing arts, performance art, painting and film. Nathalie Djurberg’s and Hans Berg’s solo exhibition “A journey through mud and confusion with small glimpses of air” that is on presentation at Moderna Museet, is the artists’ largest exhibition for more than a decade and describes an inner journey, an attempt to make existence more comprehensible in a flow of impulses and impressions. The artists create dreamlike realities, their playfully-told fables blend humour with darkness, suspending any moral laws of gravity. Their intense chamber pieces enact fragments of memories repressed between innocence and shame, or feverish daydreams of role play and desire. They topple accepted truths about man’s supremacy in nature and our habitual understanding of remembrance, time and space. Embedded in these works is a burlesque social critique that – sometimes literally – undresses the men of power, given hierarchies and social norms. Some archetypal settings recur in the works: the dark forest, the illuminated stage, the mysterious cave and the intimate chamber. Confined spaces where painful or droll situations are enacted between characters who are often close to one another. The journey meanders through dark underworlds, up into light and air, only to delve back down into the shadows – through wallpapered rooms and underbrush, coiling music loops and wormholes in time. The presentation features immersive installations with music and videos, including “The Parade” and “The Experiment” and 20 independent moving image works. Several entirely new videos and sculptures works created especialy for the exhibition are shown and the artists’ first VR works. The exhibition expands into a couple of rooms with iconic works and rarely-shown pieces from the Moderna Museet Collection of surrealism and Dada. For “The Parade” (2011), Djurberg has created five captivating animations and an unnerving menagerie of more than eighty freestanding bird sculptures. Drawing on avian physiology, rituals of mating and territorial display, and the social phenomenon of flocking, she has assembled a fantastical procession of species all fashioned from modest materials such as clay, wire, and painted canvas. These hybrid, sometimes monstrous forms speak to the artist’s recurring interest in physical and psychological transformation, as well as pageantry, perversion, and abjection. In the accompanying claymation videos, humans and animals alike act out upsetting scenarios of torture, humiliation, and masquerade, further mining the interplay of brutality and guilt at the heart of Djurberg’s work. Berg’s eerie film is composed of elements both found and invented, merges to form a unified soundscape. With these films, both artists have begun to conceive narrative in spatial terms as aspects of character, setting, sound, and action migrate from one story to the next across the exhibition space. Rather than a typical bedtime story, “Delights of an Undirected Mind” (2016) is an orgiastic stream of consciousness that takes the journey towards sexual discovery as a means to explore the inner workings of fantasy, deviance and role-play. Accompanied by Berg’s driving beats, the film follows the carnivalesque dreams of a young girl and features a multitude of familiar yet distorted characters who engage in seemingly innocent activities that are suggestive of more craven or sinful desires. “Worship” (2016) exposes the stereotypes associated with the porn industry, featuring a parade of puppets clad in velour, latex and sequins writhing in sexually suggestive positions, to an electro-pop score. Victims and perpetrators switch roles, characters exploit and are exploited. Here the emotions of lust, possession and greed reach a climax until all that is left is unadulterated worship. “Dark Side of the Moon” (2017), is set in dark woodland to an atmospheric and interactive soundscape. Ruminating on fear, dreamtime and memory, this video expands the notion of sexuality beyond mere urge or infatuation, to encompass loves lost and the yearning for those formative experiences of youth. “The Black Pot” differs greatly from previous works insofar as the film does not contain scenes of violence, graphic sexual imagery or extreme physiological states. Instead, a certain poetic and metaphorical abstraction emerges within the fragmented narrative. Drawing on classical mythology, Djurberg plays with the subject of ontogenesis (the transformation of an organism from an egg to a mature form). The Black Pot, like all the films by the artist, is accompanied by the eccentric and hypnotic music of Hans Berg.
Info: Curator: Lena Essling, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 16/6-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
