SITUATE / 20 September to 10 October 2015
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 dramatize 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. 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.
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg live and work in Berlin. Born in Lysekil, Sweden in 1978, Nathalie Djurberg received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2002. Hans Berg was born in Rättvik, Sweden in 1978 and is a musician, producer and composer, working mainly with electronic music. Recent exhibitions of their work have been held at Foundation Prada, Milan; Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; New Museum, New York; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. Nathalie Djurberg won the presitgious Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale 2009.
The Secret Garden
Surreal and ultra-sensory, ACCA’s exhibition The Secret Garden by Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg opens up a netherworld of strange delights and encounters. In their immersive landscape, sculpture, light, sound and film mix to dazzling effect. But don’t be fooled by its apparent benignness; in the nooks and crannies of this psychic and hallucinatory place, the id runs riot with tales of trouble in Paradise. The Secret Garden features an exciting new commission, as well as a survey of the savagely humorous claymation films that first brought Djurberg and Berg into the international spotlight. Presented in association with Melbourne Festival.
To hear ACCA's Exhibition Manager Annika Kristensen in conversation with Nathalie and Hans please visit Art, Design, Media on RMIT University iTunes U.
This residency has been supported by ACCA