Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: A Place of Opportunity and Transformation: National Nordic Museum, Seattle

World-renowned Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg invite visitors to travel to A Place of Opportunity and Transformation in their most recent exhibition and their first institutional exhibition on the West Coast in over a decade.

The National Nordic Museum’s gallery metamorphosizes into a whimsical and mysterious world of the artists’ creation. Visitors enter 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 and branches. Elsewhere in the exhibition are ovoid and spherical sculptures of eggs and moons. These objects resemble people with facial features and limbs. They are more than sculptures; they are actors portraying human characteristics in stop-motion animation films that are screened in the exhibition space.

Nathalie 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, Hans Berg has composed complementary soundscapes for 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 set in an ominous forest with a curious cast of characters. The exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title, A Place of Opportunity and Transformation, 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.

Djurberg & Berg: A Place of Opportunity and Transformation has been organized by the National Nordic Museum’s Chief Curator, Leslie Anderson, in collaboration with the artists.

Photo by Jim Bennett/Photo Bakery for the National Nordic Museum