#163: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

Friday, 16 October 2026, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Mixing animation, sculpture and sound, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg create psychologically charged scenarios dealing with human and animal desires. Since 2001, Djurberg has developed a distinctive style of filmmaking, using stop-motion clay animation to dramatise the basest of natural instincts—from jealousy, revenge and greed to submission and lust. Her grotesque, often sexually charged figures inhabit a surreal world where the boundaries between human and animal, the comic and the disturbing, are constantly shifting.

Working intuitively and uninhibited by traditional methods of art making, Djurberg painstakingly handcrafts elaborate characters and environments from clay, plasticine, foam, wire, fabric and paint. Their tactile, visceral surfaces contribute to the peculiar mixture of violence, eroticism, absurdity and humour that characterises her work. Within these often childlike fantasies, fairytale characters, animals, stereotypes and post-human figures act out scenarios in which power, desire and vulnerability are constantly exchanged.

Her partner, the musician and composer Hans Berg, creates the atmospheric sound effects and hypnotic scores that have become an integral part of Djurberg’s animations and installations. Rather than simply accompanying the images, his compositions can intensify the drama or deliberately contrast with what is being portrayed, creating an additional layer of tension and emotional ambiguity.

In 2004, they began working closely together as a duo, creating transgressive narratives rich in symbolic meaning and emotional intensity. Drawing on allegorical myths, fantasies and nightmarish visions, their works explore primal drives, power relations and the darker sides of human behaviour in pieces such as Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt (2004), We Are Not Two, We Are One (2008), and, more recently, Worship (2016) and Dark Side of the Moon (2017). Their interdisciplinary collaboration increasingly blurs the boundaries between the cinematic, the sculptural and the performative. Moving images, music, sculptures and constructed environments come together in immersive installations that engage the senses as much as the imagination.

Once Removed on My Mother’s Side, 2008, 05:20 min
Once Removed on My Mother’s Side shows an intimate and unruly encounter between a daughter and her mother, whose enormous body seems to exceed the limits of the domestic space around her. The daughter tends to, examines and negotiates her mother’s physical presence. Care, dependence and confrontation run through the film, while the mother’s exaggerated body is at once comic, maternal and disturbing. Their relationship becomes a negotiation between closeness and separation.

Delights of an Undirected Mind, 2016, 06:40 min
Delights of an Undirected Mind takes place in a bedroom where sleep gives way to a procession of creatures, desires and transformations. Rabbits, tigers and other fantastical visitors enter the room as bodies multiply, collide and merge into a feverish world of excess. The music drives the action, setting the pace for each new arrival and abrupt turn, as the film moves between desire, absurdity, humour and menace.

One Need Not Be a House, The Brain Has Corridors, 2018, 08:18 min
One Need Not Be a House, The Brain Has Corridors moves through an endless patterned hallway, where doors open onto a succession of characters, desires and confrontations. Figures appear, pursue one another, couple, quarrel and transform, as if thoughts and impulses have taken physical form. Words and fragments of language appear alongside them, while repetition gives the corridor a growing sense of confinement. The rolling, tumbling music keeps pushing forward, as though there is no way to stop moving through this unstable inner space.

How to Slay a Demon, 2019, 06:20 min
How to Slay a Demon is seen entirely from a first-person perspective, as one demon after another approaches the unseen protagonist. Attack, seduction and resistance begin to overlap, and attraction becomes difficult to separate from threat. A heavy bass drum pulses like a heartbeat, while distant, ethereal voices have the seductive pull of sirens. The music draws the viewer further into a cycle of desire, danger and the urge for more.

This Is Heaven, 2019, 06:36 min
This Is Heaven follows a grotesque and self-important figure through a fantastical world, driven by ambition, vanity and the need to succeed. Surrounded by other strange inhabitants, he pursues his idea of success with complete self-belief and very little awareness of his own ridiculousness. The soaring, 1980s-inflected soundtrack gives his quest an outsized heroic quality, making his determination to be a winner both triumphant and comic.

The Soft Spot, 2021, 04.20 min
The Soft Spot moves between tenderness, desire and intrusion. A vulnerable creature becomes the subject of an intimate investigation as its body is touched, probed and opened, revealing hidden spaces and unexpected transformations. Care and violation remain close to one another, and softness becomes both an invitation and a point of vulnerability. Heavy beats and a hypnotic, almost ritualistic melody accompany the more compulsive probing, before giving way to quieter moments of tenderness.

A Pancake Moon, 2022, 06:14 min
A Pancake Moon takes place in a forest where a pig, a wolf, a bear and an egg encounter one another in a game of appetite, threat and transformation. Predator and prey exchange roles, while violence, tenderness and absurdity move in and out of one another. The music gives the encounters an uneasy rhythm and carries the characters through the film’s dreamlike logic.

The Stretch, 2026, ca. 06:30 min
The Stretch takes place in a dark, enclosed space where two figures meet, separate and gradually become caught up in one another. Fragments of language cover the walls and floor: questions, commands and repeated appeals to come closer. As the words accumulate, they begin to take over the space. The two bodies merge, cling and struggle to remain separate, while intimacy moves between attraction, dependence and discomfort. Under ultraviolet light, hidden parts of the environment suddenly become luminous, making the space feel at once seductive and difficult to escape.

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg currently live and work in Sweden. Born in Lysekil, Sweden in 1978, Nathalie Djurberg received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden in 2002. Hans Berg was born in Rättvik, Sweden in 1978 and is a musician, producer and composer, working mainly with electronic music. Select solo exhibitions include ‘Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: Death or Eternal Delight’ at Gelleri F15, Moss, Norway (2025); SONGEUN Art Space, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Na-tional Nordic Museum, Seattle, USA (2024); Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden (2023); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2023); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (2023); Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, China (2021); the Baltimore Museum of Art, USA (2018); Modern Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2018), touring to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Tren-to and Rovereto, Italy (2018) and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2019); Museum Frieder Burda | Salon Berlin, Ger-many (2017); Stavanger Art Museum (MUST), Norway (2017); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Australia (2016); Wanås Konst, Knislinge, Sweden (2016); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Australia (2015); ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark (2015); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA (2014); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia (2013); and Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2011). They won the Silver Lion for their presentation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy in 2009, and their work is featured in a number of collections around the world, including the Prada Foundation in Milan, Italy and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA. In 2025, they were named Chevaliers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry.