Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: A Journey Through Mud and Confusion with Small Glimpses of Air

There is an element of seduction when encountering films by Nathalie Djurberg (*1978) and Hans Berg (*1978)—striking and immediate, they attract the viewer into colorful, suggestive worlds accompanied by hypnotic music. Their playfully told, dismal fables full of black humor examine the great questions of humankind. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the Swedish artist duo’s oeuvre for the first time in Germany in an extensive survey exhibition.

On display are some 40 video and sound works from the past two decades, including early videos such as My Name is Mud (2003) and Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt (2004), large-format installations like The Parade (2011), The Potato (2008) and The Experiment (2009), recent works such as One Need Not Be a House, The Brain Has Corridors (2018), and Dark Side of the Moon (2017), numerous sculptures, and the duo’s first virtual-reality work It Will End in Stars (2018).

Philipp Demandt, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, comments: “Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg are artists with a very individual oeuvre that is unrivaled in contemporary art. And it is therefore of very special significance that we are able to present their joint artistic work to our visitors on this scale for the first time in Germany. Their films, installations, sculptures, and compositions call to mind absurd dreams as well as repressed memories.”

Nathalie Djurberg became known for her stop-motion films as early as 2003—a slow, very elaborate animation technique in which a series of stills creates the illusion of movement. Figures made of plasticine, clay, fabric, and artificial hair are protagonists in a filmic narration for which Hans Berg has provided the music since 2004, composing a specific sound for each film. The exhibition sheds light on Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s joint artistic oeuvre. Both members of the artist duo work intuitively in their own medium—without a script, a storyboard, or a predetermined dramatic curve. The process-related character of their work is foregrounded: it does not try to arrive at an end, but instead comes down to the process itself. Through the interplay of sculpture, moving pictures, and sound, the viewers get caught up in a maelstrom that is virtually impossible to resist. Djurberg and Berg let their figures step into action in ominous scenes, in the forest, in a cave, a chamber, or on a stage, where they are driven by an unconscious inner longing or experience painful, sometimes even grotesque situations. The artists take visitors to the exhibition on a journey into the interior of humankind—with films that resemble absurd dreams and suppressed memories and explore the limits of what is humanly tolerable in a dense atmosphere.

Katharina Dohm, curator of the exhibition at the Schirn, on the artists: “The tension in Nathalie Djurberg’s stop-motion films arises from the discrepancy between the ostensibly playful medium and the storylines, which frequently go to the limits of what is humanly tolerable. The music of Hans Berg plays an essential role by undermining or intensifying the atmosphere in the films and thus opening up further levels of interpretation. Viewers find themselves, apparently by chance, in the position of a voyeur; they must decide how to relate to the figures’ excesses and vulnerability.”

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg live and work in Berlin. Nathalie Djurberg studied at the Folkuniversitetet and at the Hovedskous Art School in Gothenburg as well as the Malmö Art Academy. The two artists have been working together since 2004. Their works have been shown in group and solo exhibitions around the world, among others at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005), the 4th Berlin Biennale, the Tate Modern, London, and MoMA PS1, New York (2006), at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2007), at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Sammlung Goetz, Munich, and the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2008), at the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2010), at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the New Museum, New York (2011), at the Kunsthalle Helsinki (2013), at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014), at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2015), and at the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2016). They have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Silver Lion of the 53rd Biennale, Venice (2009), and the Cairo Biennale Prize, 12th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo (2010).

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg. A Journey Through Mud and Confusion with Small Glimpses of Air is supported by the City of Frankfurt am Main.

A catalog has been published in an English and a German edition, edited by Lena Essling with texts by Lena Essling, Patricia MacCormack, David Toop, and Massimiliano Gioni as well as a foreword by the directors of the Moderna Museet, the MART and the Schirn.

An exhibition of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in cooperation with the MART, Rovereto, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

On May 14, 2019 there will be an artist talk at the Schirn. Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg will be speaking with the curator of the show, Katharina Dohm, about their latest works and the exhibition.

Director: Dr. Philipp Demandt
Curators: Lena Essling, Moderna Museet, and Katharina Dohm, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press/Public Relations):
presse [​at​] schirn.de / T (+49 69) 29 98 82 148

Press material: www.schirn.de/en (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)