Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: A Place of Opportunity and Transformation

Step inside "A Place of Opportunity and Transformation." The National Nordic Museum’s gallery metamorphosized into a mysterious world conceived by sculptor and filmmaker Nathalie Djurberg and musician and composer Hans Berg. Visitors first encountered a large-scale immersive installation titled "The Stone Garden" (2023), a cold and inhospitable environment, yet one that supports plant life. Colorful flowers bloom from boulders. Lying beyond "The Stone Garden" is a forest populated by ovoid and spherical sculptures of eggs and moons. Broken branches rest on the gallery floor. These objects resemble people with facial features and limbs. Far from inanimate sculptures; they are actors portraying human characteristics in stop-motion animation films that are screened within the same space.

Djurberg creates sculptures and films to explore fantasies and fears, personal secrets, and universal truths. She has selected stop-motion animation to express ideas that are otherwise inexplicable. Over the course of their twenty-year collaboration, Berg has composed complementary soundscapes that convey the mood of the animations. The three films on view are "Dark Side of the Moon" (2017), "A Pancake Moon" (2022), and "Howling at the Moon" (2022), contemporary fairy tales with a curious cast of characters. The exhibition’s title references the films’ setting, a fantastical forest in which the narratives’ protagonists resist and fall victim to opportunistic predators on their journey or search in vain for answers to life’s great mysteries.

Curated Programming:
Advance Screening at the July 25 - 28, 2024, at the Seattle Art Fair

Artists in Conversation on August 3, 2024: Chief Curator Leslie Anderson interviews Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

Musical Performance on October 26, 2024: Hans Berg performed music live with animations created by Nathalie Djurberg