Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: Only For the Wicked: Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden

Only for the Wicked by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg is an exhibition set in the underworld, leading us into an environment of winding mine shafts and caves. Large-scale installations, sculptures, video works and powerful music transport visitors to a hidden treasure chamber and an ongoing, meandering treasure hunt. We are led through dark, intimate passages, where works of art appear at intervals, like precious gems.

Djurberg & Berg are masters of creating atmospheres and ambiguous situations, transporting us between different moods and states of mind, where what we see is twisted and warped and constantly needs to be renegotiated. This takes place in the many-layered and ongoing narrative, and in their exceedingly physical soundtrack. With humour and darkness, they portray complex behaviours, where playful situations of pleasure suddenly transform into disgust and boundaries are constantly being moved and transgressed.

Thematically, the works in the exhibition highlight how greed and the quest for riches, success and power change a person profoundly, urging us to an incessant search for more, in an obsessive, toxic spiral. They also reflect the dangers of over-consumption and the depletion of collective global resources, and their consequences in a larger perspective.

This exhibition will be the world premiere for several new works: the video clay animation Only for the Wicked – consisting of seven films, which also provided the exhibition title, the three gilt sculptures Portrait of a Wicked, 1, 2 & 3, and the installation The Stone Garden.

Photography by Handrik Zeitler. Courtesy the artists and Boras Konstmuseum.