COMMUNITY: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg on an Exploration

Schirn Kunsthalle

03.03.2020

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“I would always start with an unspoken question. It’s an exploration every time, and it starts as an exploration, trying to find what it is you’re really looking for – which can never really be touched.” — Nathalie Djurberg

Daily Plinth has to admit that we still love art fairs. Of course, one of our favorites is our home town show, The Armory Show, opening this week, March 5-8, 2020, with a preview on March 4. One of the things we love about art fairs is the opportunity to see multiple museum-quality exhibitions and installations under one roof. This year at The Armory Show, one installation we are looking forward to in particular is that of the brilliant installation and filmmaking duo, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. Presented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery as part of the Platform program is This Is Heaven, “an immersive, surreal environment comprised of a video projection and group of sculptures of strangely prehistoric-looking birds feeding on verdant tropical flowers,” according to The Armory Show.

Last spring, the duo were featured in their first major exhibition in Germany, at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, who produced this preview.

From Schirn:

There is an element of seduc­tion to any encounter with the films of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. The inter­ac­tion of sculp­ture, sugges­tive picto­rial worlds and hypnotic music soon sucks one inescapably into the pieces. The SCHIRN is presenting the first exten­sive survey exhi­bi­tion of the duo’s work in Germany. Among the 40 or so works from the last two decades are early videos, large-format instal­la­tions and their first VR project. Nathalie Djurberg first took the lime­light with her stop-motion videos – a slow and very elab­o­rate

anima­tion process in which a series of stills are edited to create the illu­sion of motion. The dolls made of Play-Doh, clay, textiles and arti­fi­cial hair are the protag­o­nists in a filmic narra­tion that has been accom­pa­nied since 2004 by music composed by Hans Berg. The Swedish artist duo works completely intu­itively each in their own medium, without a prewritten script, story­board or a prede­ter­mined dramatic plot. Djurberg and Berg take you along on a journey into the inner work­ings of human beings – with films that resemble absurd dreams and suppressed memo­ries, and with their highly atmos­pheric feel explore the limits of what is humanly toler­able.