The catalogue of human nightmares by Nathalie Djurberg e Hans Berg at MART

“Yes, you are lost, yes, you are drowning in concealment and excuses, your feet sink into the mud and you are fighting, fighting. Drag those muddy shoes into the room. Here you are welcome, you always have been, this is your home, your temple, this is all for you. This is a celebration.” With these introductory words, published at the beginning of the guide to the exhibition (which has already been shown at the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, and is now at the MART in Rovereto until 27 January, to then move on to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt), Nathalie Djurberg (visual artist, born in 1978) and Hans Berg (musician and composer, born in 1978) welcome us at the entrance. 

However, on entering, the visual impact is that of a gaudy, extremely colourful and apparently lively world which, for an instant (but only an instant), leads us to forget the welcome message aimed at our darker side. But shifting attention away from the overall effect, our eyes begin to focus on the details of the sculptures, on projections, the ears focus on the sounds which slowly hypnotise the body and we understand that the dark side is already active: blood and violence, manic possession and grotesque bodies flow across the walls, while the room is teeming with birds that on closer examination seem to be almost monstrous, all elements which return in various forms right through to the end of the exhibition.

There are plenty of examples of monstrosity to be found in the history of art, from the most obvious gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals, to memorable frescoes such as the Triumph of Death in Palermo, Jupiter and Io by Correggio, or the infinite procession of the damned and of demons which appear, for example, in The Last Judgement, but there are also depictions of nightmares, such as the famous painting by Johann Heinrich Füssli, to name but a few, in no particular order. In this case, the wide-eyed stares of certain characters, the spurts of blood and the crude features recall one of the most disturbing cycles in the history of European art, the dark paintings in Francisco Goya’s Quinta del Sordo. Yet there is something in this sense of disturbance created by the Swedish duo that is not quite right, because the horror in Goya is undoubtedly also due to the contribution made by the dark colours. Here, on the contrary, we bear witness to a jarring clash between the joyful colours of children’s Plasticine which communicates a message in complete contrast to the forms and actions of the characters in these stories, but also to the atmosphere created by the music in the halls, and it is perhaps this aspect which irresistibly attracts us to the terrifying worlds of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, made up of unspeakable horrors presented in a reconstructed, artificial and in a certain sense deliberately infantile manner.

The second hall begins to lead us into the darkness surrounding the monitors which display early works by Djurberg, who at the time only collaborated with Berg once animation was complete. From this point onwards, the darkness merely amplifies the brightness of the colours, which seem to continue to blare happiness in the very centre of a carnival of horrors. The symphony of deformed bodies, bulging eyes, skeletons, worms, abuse, survival, zoophilia and perversions of all kinds continues throughout the exhibition. This catalogue of human nightmares could certainly not have avoided entering the highly complex zone of the mother-child relationship, and so, inside a huge potato (called The Potato, of course), we witness the drama of a mother whose children return inside her, or that of a daughter crushed by the (actual) weight of her obese and ill mother.  

In our anguished journey through disturbing videos featuring crying infants calling for help that will never come, desperate dragon-women, frustrated and lonely beasts, corridors with infinite doors which open on to other identical corridors, like the worst kind of labyrinth, precious phallic objects, mice, cats, and birds sat around tables set and soiled with their very bestiality, there are only two pauses. Mid-exhibition, in a room where visitors can abandon themselves to sound while contemplating the lithe and abstract forms that float around, and at the end, with an interactive work in which, via virtual reality, we end up in the home of a wolf in a forest, and in order to exit we have to pass through our origins and our obsessions.

Although they do not scream like the colours, the sound compositions accompany us throughout the exhibition and it seems as though they show us the way, directing our feelings. The fact that music is capable of constructing a magnetic atmosphere around us was already well-understood by Saint Augustine, who in his Confessions spoke of the “pleasure of hearing”, capable of luring and dominating the soul to the point of prevailing over reason.