Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
Fantastical forays of shame and desire.
“It always starts with an unanswered question. It’s an exploration every time - trying to find what you’re really looking for.”
In fabulously weird animations, Djurberg and Berg balance child-like imagination with grotesque violence to explore dark facets of human psychology and animalistic desire. Djurberg creates the animations and installations, handcrafting characters and backdrops from materials such as clay, plasticine, fabric, wire and paint. Berg then scores technopop-come-classical soundtracks to amplify the complex emotional charge of the films’ disorientating storylines. Image and sound coalesce in playful-yet-unnerving artworks which envelop their viewers in strangely seductive environments. Inspired by fol...
In fabulously weird animations, Djurberg and Berg balance child-like imagination with grotesque violence to explore dark facets of human psychology and animalistic desire. Djurberg creates the animations and installations, handcrafting characters and backdrops from materials such as clay, plasticine, fabric, wire and paint. Berg then scores technopop-come-classical soundtracks to amplify the complex emotional charge of the films’ disorientating storylines. Image and sound coalesce in playful-yet-unnerving artworks which envelop their viewers in strangely seductive environments. Inspired by folklore traditions in their native Sweden, the works riff on famous fairytales and cinematic tropes to giddily bizarre effect.
The duo’s practice is a space of ultimate freedom. Delights of an Undirected Mind (2016) sees an unlikely clan of creatures - including a unicorn, crocodile and the big bad wolf - touching and interacting with each other in a fetishistic fairytale. These disconcertingly perverse sex scenes appear throughout the artists’ oeuvre. Discomfort is, however, precisely the point: while sexuality and human desire has been made taboo by society, they remain our most ubiquitous experiences. “Sex is something that connects all humans and animals and is one of our most fundamental needs and instincts.” Through idiosyncratic expression Djurberg and Berg probe the universal tenets of humanity - a dizzying exploration of what it means to feel.
Nathalie Djuerberg was born in 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden, and Hans Berg was born the same year in Rättvik, Sweden. The pair have practiced as a duo since 2004.
In 2020, original sculpture Crocodile, Egg, Man (2012) sold in a Buttowskis' auction for €1,600,000 - a staggering 46 times its estimate.
Aside from providing soundtracks for the duo's animations, Hans' sets have kept revelers dancing in some of the world’s best-loved underground nightclubs.
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In that – being despicable – is an enormous tenderness and compassion.
Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
