File Note 65: Nathalie Djurberg

To enter an installation by Nathalie Djurberg is to enter a new world. At the Venice Biennale in 2009 she constructed a forest of exotic plants and triffids. Pervaded by sounds composed by Hans Berg that were at once submarine, cavernous and tropical, insistently rhythmical and piercingly affective, the viewer was unsure whether they were beneath the sea, in a cave or in the jungle, witnessing existential crises of a brutal nature enacted by puppets in low tech films.

At Camden the visitor will enter the central passage beneath a ceiling evincing sunrise and storm, hope and apocalypse, two ends of the spectrum, the beginning of time and the end of time. And then on into a cool world of objects based on glasses, decanters and jugs, illuminated by a cold light, that seem like relics of the past, casting shadows and silhouettes on the floor and walls. Unusually for Djurberg, the soundtrack for all four films, composed by Berg, will be the same, thus creating a subtle, fragile atmosphere enveloping the viewer. Seeing the same objects on screen as those that surround them the viewer will be encouraged to think that they are inhabiting a parallel universe. 

Often seen as ancillary to Djurberg’s work, the soundtrack is in fact a key. There in the background it influences the viewer’s interpretation of the visual presentation in an almost subliminal way. It is a reverberating sound suggestive of an enclosed space, whether a chamber or a body. Opening with pure percussion that provides an underlying, insistent throb throughout, Berg adds delicate and enchanting trills and runs. Tapping noises convey the sound of ice and glass as it is struck but also recall a means of wordless communication used by imprisoned humans. Eventually the percussive rhythm becomes more insistent and is joined by scrapes and tubular sounds with the occasional tinkle of glass as the protagonists on screen expire. As a terrible fate unfolds, Berg’s music becomes more brutal and cavernous, ratcheting up the viewer’s levels of anxiety as though they suddenly become aware of the strength of their own heartbeat. The synaesthetic quality of Berg’s soundtracks owes something to his admiration of the work of Björk, Aphex Twin and Plaid where electronic sounds create mood as much as suggest narrative. Relentlessness is characteristic certainly of the last two.

Djurberg’s world consists of tough experiences, where mothers consume their children, are unable to communicate with them and crush their caring daughters beneath their obese bodies; where pus, shit, blood, excrement and farts, those elements of life that we normally conceal, are brought to the fore in a strategy of normalisation, where beauty and squalor, sweet perfume and the stench of decay linger in the air. It is at one and the same time liberating and reinhibiting, returning us to childhood and our desire to play with faecal matter, while simultaneously reinforcing the social taboos that prevent us from doing so. The grotesque reawakens long buried fears, ridiculing and dissipating them through disinhibition but never finally resolving them, so that they remain fundamentally rooted in our psyche. It plays with us, taunts us and amuses us by the very fact that we know that it enacts our fantasies and we may experience them vicariously.

Djurberg’s work is full of ambiguity. The morals of her tales are often left open-ended as though she abdicates the divine responsibility of the puppeteer at the crucial moment. Life is not black and white. The themes of her new films may be horrific but they are infested with beauty and delicacy. Her rich palette of colours, her painterly models and puppets all testify to her original training as a painter and sculptor and her continuing admiration of abstract art. Her roughcast models and their seemingly straight-from-the-can colours are reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s Store (1961), another Swedish example of the modern grotesque so closely based on reality. Oldenburg’s ice cream sundaes, dripping with raspberry sauce, and burgers oozing with Ketchup and melted cheese are the ancestors of Djurberg’s bleeding victims. His interest in the erotic, fetishistic nature of consumerist society and his emphasis on the hand-made object also resonate with Djurberg’s vision.

There was a certain perverse quality to Oldenburg’s work, the way in which he took commercial icons and highlighted their grossness. Ed Kienholz also saw the disturbing sides of the modern American dream, revealing the desperation of backstreet abortions and prostitutes in brothels. His was a brutal world. Djurberg has inherited that spirit, as well as that of the French writer, Georges Bataille, who turned morality upside down and found pleasure in all that was deemed to be morally base. Bataille’s richly coloured descriptions and erotic episodes reverberate in Djurberg’s work. Moral uncertainty lies at the heart of it.