Nathalie Djurberg, "Turn into Me"
Installation view, Fondazione Prada, Photo: Attilio Marazano
Specifically designed for Fondazione Prada’s exhibition spaces by Nathalie Djurberg (Rättvik, Sweden, 1978)—one of the leading figures of a new generation of internationally active artists—the project consists of models that resemble parts of human body and hint at universal symbols. These models become pavilions inside which Djurberg’s videos representing visceral compelling desires and compulsive sexual thoughts are projected.
Djurberg’s videos are short animations made using Stop Motion techniques that use small plasticine figures in order to create surreal atmospheres and that are often grotesque stories. The staging of these stories is rudimentary but ingenious, infusing an ambiguous sense of anxiety and unease through their sexual reflections, with references to violence, the macabre, gruesome, and subtle pleasures of cruelty and perversion.
Djurberg’s works are characterized by an obsessive rhythm, permeated by a taste for the ironic and humorous, conveying a sense of anxiety and nostalgia, along with unease and occasionally even profound anguish. The sensations are reinforced throughout all her work by music composed by Hans Berg, a Swedish composer.
