Controversial Dreams

While sitting in a way too touristic tour boat through Copenhagen, a large billboard struck our eyes. It said: “Nathalie Djurberg, Snake Knows it’s Yoga.” Reading this immediately rang a bell, since the same exhibition was recently on display in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in our home town Rotterdam. The billboard also announced ‘Film / Kunst. Art Moves #1.’ Since cross media is an interesting field of artistic research, we decided to go and have a look at exhibition space GL STRAND.

GL STRAND turned out to be a combined space for both art by known contemporary artists, like the Swedish Djurberg, and young Danish talents. Also, there is a coffee bar / reading corner with books on street art, the vivid and fashionable bicycle culture of Copenhagen and art magazines. But it was the three floors of exhibition space we were there for.

Do you remember Wallace and Gromit? In the late 80s, these clay figures starred in clay animation -or claymation- movies. However, the technique dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. For every new shot the figures have to be put into the right position, mostly just slightly different from the last. Nathalie Djurberg (1978) also turned to this time-consuming way of creating moving images, but she didn’t stick to clay alone. Strings of glue, wax, silicon, fabric, hair, paint: it looks like she just grabbed whatever was available to make her nightmarish creatures come to live. Movies are the centerpieces, but the clay sculptures made to create them have become an integral part of her exhibitions. Initially, that was not her intention, but since someone told Djurberg that the sculptures were more likely to sell than the video’s, she took them out of her studio and into the showcases.

In ‘I Find Myself Alone’ (2008) a girl in a ballerina outfit dances on a table filled with cupcakes and flowery teacups. She pricks up her lips and innocently blinks her large eyes. I see a beautiful sculpture of a naked man swinging from a pink tulip tree. His hair is chestnut brown and wavy. He seems to have a good time. Still, it seems eerie. Maybe that is because I know what more is coming. To step into the world of Nathalie Djurberg and her husband Hans Berg sends you into a place of controversial dreams.

Many of Djurbergs works feature naked girls with long hair and sensual mouths. Some forced under the coats of catholic churchmen, others climbing on top of each other, bending like a contortionist and clinching their fingernails into each others flesh until it bleeds. She also created many different shamans, male and female. Embellished with feathers, beads, beautiful clothing and lots of messy hair. Some of the sculptures are hidden in a massive lump of clay, filled with worms.

Djurberg and Berg state that they are fascinated by both reaching new levels of existance – or even enlightenment – through pain and endorsement, but also through luxury and ecstasy. To focus on your own senses and to not be afraid of the urges and fantasies inside you, is what they want to communicate. Roy Stuart, the photographer that shoots other people’s sexual fantasies, comes to mind. Djurberg on the other hand, seems to display her own inside world.

Each film has a different soundtrack, composed by Berg. Therefore, ‘Snake Knows it’s Yoga’ is a soundscape in which image and sound reinforce each other. The exhibition Kunst / Film. Art moves # 1 underlines this. It is the first chapter of a three-year project that “aims to explore the radical art that arises in the interface between different forms of artistic expression.” Four short films were made by different teams of both visual artists and filmmakers. They all seem to have picked one of art’s many values and made it their focus point.

The first film is called ‘The House Inside Her’ (Pernille Rose Grønkjær & Astrid Kruse Jensen). Its makers have combined beautiful imagery with the power of sound, not language. While an ethereal girl walks around in a house taken over by natural forces like water and trees, I hear the dry cracking sound of sheets of paper flying around on the screen. Then ‘Rainbow Monkeys’ (Martin de Thurah & John Kørner). Here a couple decides to live freely in nature and really “create something together”. This almost moralizing movie takes the political power of art as it’s starting point. ‘Rupture’ (Januz Metz & Christina Hamre) is more or less shock art. A woman, screaming and crying, relives a violent love scene. In a dark and unidentified scenery, red blood covers more and more of their bodies. I couldn’t stand it and walked away. The same happens to me when I try to look at works by Paul McCarthy or Erkka Nissinen. It shocks me a little bit too much. ‘KLL’ (Christoffer Boe & Ingvar Cronhammar) is set in a small dark room with a glowing red cord behind which you must stand. On the screen imagery of truck engines and a wolf on the road. By playing with the standards of two dimensionality, they have turned the film into a spacious installation. And since that also accounts for ‘Snake Knows it’s Yoga’, GL STRAND provided us with an all-embracing art experience to get us through another day.