Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Howling at the Moon, 2022. ©SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation and the Artist. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artists, Lisson Gallery; Gió Marconi; Tanya Bonakdar
SONGEUN presents Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg’s exhibition, “Beneath the Cultivated Grounds, Secrets Await”, through July 13.
Winner of the Silver Lion for young artists at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Nathalie Djurberg and Swedish composer Hans Berg have gained international recognition for their grotesque and mesmerizing stop-motion animations based on clay figures and hypnotic soundtracks that explore our animalistic desires.
Co-curated by Mario Mainetti, curator of the Fondazione prada, this is the first exhibition in Korea in 15 years since Nathalie’s solo exhibition “Turn into Me” at Prada Transformers in 2009, and the first exhibition in Korea for the duo.
Collaborating as a full-fledged duo since 2004, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg transcend traditional artistic boundaries to weave immersive narratives that cross animation, music, sculpture, and installation. Their collaborative work is an engaging fusion of visual art, music, and three-dimensional storytelling, blurring the boundaries between film, sculpture, and performance by combining video and music into immersive environments with related sets and sculptures.
In addition to the exhibition’s title, “Beneath the Cultivated Grounds, Secrets Await,” the overall composition of the exhibition is inspired by the spatial qualities of SONGEUN. In many stories from both East and West, shadowy and mysterious subterranean spaces such as caves strongly suggest the existence of the unknown and the unknowable, and evoke a fascination with the unpredictable and surprising.
The exhibition’s flow is consistent with this: after entering the exhibition, the second and third floors are devoted to clay animations of forests, anthropomorphized animals and objects from their works since 2003, which continue to appear throughout the exhibition. The final level, the basement, invites visitors to discover the secrets that lie beneath the ground, and to come up with their own stories.
