Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, both born in 1978, are a Swedish contemporary art duo who have collaborated since 2004. Djurberg creates clay stop-motion animation, sculpture and visual worlds, while Berg develops the music, sound and electronic soundscapes. Art21 describes their combination of sculpture, sound and film as absurd, fairy-tale-like yet psychologically dark clay animations and installations.

Their work is distinctive: at first glance, it often looks cute and brightly colored, like a fairy tale or a world of toys. Look longer, though, and it reveals desires, greed, fear, violence, shame, and absurdity. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery also notes that their surreal narratives often explore themes of lust, greed, exploitation, and fear, with a sense of the absurd.

In 2018, Moderna Museet held their major exhibition A Journey Through Mud and Confusion with Small Glimpses of Air. Its introduction describes dreamlike animated worlds created through sculpture, music and moving images. The seemingly playful stories combine humor and darkness and can unsettle familiar moral conventions.

Simply put, they are rather like artists who turn “children’s clay animation” into a form of adult psychological theater. Their images can be sweet, strange, and cute, but at their core they address the parts of human nature we are reluctant to acknowledge: desire, worship, possession, loss of control, temptation, and that feeling of “I know it’s wrong, but I still want to look.”