NATHALIE DJURBERG AND HANS BERG | BECAUSE AVOIDANCE KNOWS NO BEDFELLOW – Flaunt Magazine

29 April 2025

I keep a dream journal and a diary like it’s my religion, but I never read what I’ve written. Shame is too potent to risk discovery, and resistance breeds avoidance.

Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg are not as cowardly as I, or most of us, for that matter. Don’t Be Afraid, There Are Treasures Behind These Locked Doors, the artists’ current exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Beijing, sheds light so vulnerable it’s painful. In the show, Djurberg’s sculptures and stop-motion animations are paired with her partner Berg’s hallucinatory audio, fostering an all-encompassing sensory experience. Language weaves a movement pulled by and through multiple planes of conversation in their collaboration.

The sculptures included in this show consist of colorful flowers, fauna, birds, and bulbs, planted on Kleinian blue branches—a comforting motif. The permanence of impermanence, one can’t help but see a moment as forever. Something is stagnant until it’s swept away.

“They are not as beautiful when you look up close,” Djurberg assures of sculptures like “A Stream Stood Still,” a blue branch with pale-colored flowers sprouting from the top.

The stories of Djurberg’s clay puppets on film are much less subtle and far more grotesque. The show includes carnivalesque and visceral animated sculptures, which hinge on Tim Burton-looking, nightmarish dreamscapes from childhood folklore: “A Pancake Moon” (2022), “The Dark Side of the Moon” (2017), and “How to Slay a Demon” (2019). As fantastical as they may be, upon closer inspection, the work isn’t as uncanny as it is intimately and deeply human.

Making an idea can be a violent act. An idea is, as Djurberg says, “as beautiful as a fantasy,” because “it isn’t tied to anything physical.” To bring one down to speech is to mangle it in a mouth. Hands have to get dirty—as Jack Whitten, an American Abstract Expressionist acclaimed for his process, asserted correctly, “The memory is in the material.”

“It’s in the making, for us, that is the art itself,” Djurberg says, describing a dramatic oscillation between “the ecstasy and the disappointment,” a phrase which she repeats a few times. “That tension never ever reach[es] any form of perfection”––or a conclusion because there isn’t one. She’s made “polished” work before, but even perfect isn’t good enough.

Berg also experiences “the agony, the joy, and the pain,” in composing the music that accompanies the animations. “If I only make really nice and pretty music, it’s boring,” he said. “There has to be something in there that scratches a little bit.” The word he looks for is friction. After all, we beat on against the current.When the process stops and the work is called finished, “the real horror begins,” Djurberg says. Hands must be wiped eventually, but they’re never fully clean.

Read the full interview with Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg in Flaunt Magazine here.