Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s Latest Show in New York City Is “Only For the Wicked”

This month, the visionary multimedia duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have transformed Tanya Bonakdar’s gallery into an enchanting world populated by the fantastical characters of their mesmerizing stop-motion videos. In a dreamlike forest recreated inside the gallery, unsettling visuals and mysterious figures emerge, shifting fluidly from haunting and dark to unexpectedly humorous, conjuring a lingering unease that outlasts one’s initial laughter.

The imagination-sparking title, “Only For The Wicked,” sets the tone for the show, provoking a specific response. “The show is only for the wicked ones,” Djurberg tells Observer when we catch up with the pair a few weeks after the opening. “Anyone who comes into the show must then be wicked since that’s what the title is, which made us laugh. First, it was the wickedness of the characters and their actions; then it included us all; very few of us get through life as saints, and who knows about saints anyway.”

Roleplay sits at the heart of the duo’s practice, which unfolds through the creation of elaborate, fantastical scenarios that become inhabited by both their imaginative characters and the viewers themselves. Their work thrives on the interplay between installation, sculpture and immersive video, creating an environment where audience and artwork continuously intersect. “We play with this idea in every situation. You have your role to play, and you play it wickedly or not. Still, you also have no control over how others interpret you or your actions,” Djurberg says. “Even though your intent might be that of a saint, who knows what the outcome will be or how your partner, for example, will interpret it.”

This fluidity of roles—where heroes and anti-heroes blur into one another—is central to the duo’s exploration of human nature. “Everyone is the hero of their own stories, or sometimes you are the anti-hero in your own story,” adds Berg. “The title reflects the fluidity of these roles, which is explored in the seven large animations featured in the show, where different characters play out very different roles depending on what scenario they happen to find themselves in.”

Drawing inspiration from fairy tales, the duo has spent years developing a colorful, wildly varied cast of stock characters and archetypal symbolic figures, operating within a framework that employs allegory and metaphor, much like the stories that inspired them. Stories were a formative part of Djurberg’s childhood: “Then, growing older, when mother no longer provided most of them, I would continue making my own, when the fantasy was still as vivid as a Hollywood movie, and our TV was limited to two channels and shared with a large family.” In the duo’s video animations, fantastical characters play out narratives that land somewhere between comedy and satyr play, veering from darkly amusing to unsettling in their absurdity.

The way these video narratives fuse comedy and psychological exploration at times recalls the “comedy of manners” popular in the 17th Century, using entertainment as a means to question conventional roles, social codes and the constraints of an artificial, hyper-stylized society. “When I started with animation, it was an unknown desire to understand the world, myself and other people— that is the basis of fairytales and storytelling—but in art, I don’t feel like I have to entertain,” says Djurberg. Their fairy-tale-inspired animations have evolved into a serious tool for investigating human existence—one that does not always make for comfortable viewing. “Hans and I don’t do this to entertain, but because you have to follow the idea and inspiration when it forces itself upon us, and in art, there is the freedom not to have a beginning, middle and end, you don’t have to tie the finishing knot in the end, and pleasing, no matter how alluring pleasing is, is not the purpose.”

Djurberg and Berg’s characters distill universal existential struggles, exposing the tensions between desire, fear and anxiety while serving as allegorical reflections of human irrationality. Their fantastical creatures embody tangled thoughts lurking beneath the surface of consciousness, made visible through exaggerated forms and grotesque situations. Often playing with the absurd, their paradoxical narratives disrupt any sense of reality, tapping into the repressed corners of the human and collective unconscious. Their characters, Djurberg says, may be absurd but they reflect reality. “Life and humans are more absurd than anything we could ever invent; we create even more absurd things in our dreams, daydreams and waking life.” Distorted and exaggerated, with amplified features and bodily functions, their figures are both repulsive and strangely magnetic, pulling viewers in while simultaneously pushing them away, just as we do with the discomforts of life itself. “It is hard to see life because we are always in it, even when we dream an absurd dream, we are in it and seldom question the absurdity of it,” she continues, explaining how bringing these paradoxes to life allows viewers to look inward, breaking through illusion or, as she puts it, “polish away the dust from our eyes that’s created by living every moment every day.”

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Having exhibited internationally—including at the Venice Biennale—since the late nineties, the duo was among the first to elevate stop-motion animation to the realm of contemporary art, embracing it as both a narrative and artistic medium. At a time when digitally rendered 3D animation was beginning to dominate cinema, they remained fiercely committed to the handmade craftsmanship of early animation techniques, preserving a tactile quality that sets their work apart. “The potential for the medium is almost endless when the flow is there,” says Djurberg, noting the built-in contradictions of stop-motion: it is silly, childlike, seemingly banal and yet, anything approached with a serious mind is inevitably undercut by the medium’s playful appearance. “That is also the beauty of it; it makes it bearable to watch something that might be emotional and, at the same time, keep you off guard since the mind won’t be as dulled as in other mediums, like when you are watching the news.”. While stop-motion borrows elements from sculpture and painting, she further argues, it remains a medium without a formal art historical lineage, offering an extraordinary degree of freedom.

At the same time, the absence of scripts and dialogues defies linear storytelling, leaving their video narratives open-ended and free for interpretation. “It’s much more aimed directly at your emotions; it’s going through fewer filters in your brain that interpret what you see and hear and hits you more directly,” explains Berg.

By staging bizarre, illogical scenarios and seemingly nonsensical narratives, Djurberg and Berg achieve the fertile “suspension of disbelief” typical of fairy tales and cinema—a narrative strategy that invites the audience to overlook fantastical or illogical elements in order to engage with the story, empathize with its characters, and ultimately challenge their own perceptions of reality and what feels “familiar.”

For this reason, their narratives expand beyond the screen, evolving into immersive, multisensory experiences that encourage the viewer to set aside skepticism, accept the logic of the fictional world, and discover something personal—something deeply rooted in their own inner and outer worlds—within it. “Our work is a form of research—a way to understand something within ourselves, and during that search, the work expands, in an urge to be immersed in something in order to understand it, to experience it, not just theorize about it,” says Berg. “We want to feel, hear and touch something to understand it and experience it fully.”

For the past twenty years, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have worked in seamless collaboration—one painstakingly handcrafting and animating figures and sets while the other composes the accompanying music and sound design. “We worked so long together now that the process is seamless (almost always). The loveliest is when there is flow and no need to make sense because the other one understands it perfectly anyway; when no flow is there, there is an endless river of complaints that Hans is unfortunate to hear,” Djurberg quips. “It’s vague discussions around something that itches that wants to be looked at, then slowly it materializes, and we talk and talk, but not always exactly about the work itself, but we tiptoe around the theme trying to hone in on it, find the essence,” adds Berg. This organic back-and-forth, marked by tensions, juxtapositions and resolutions, drives their process, infusing their work with a layered richness.

A new work almost always emerges from this interplay. Djurberg again: “Maybe I would remember if we were in that state now and not at the end of a project, but I can’t remember how it came about. I think it was a fuzzy image in mind, a half-created fantasy that was too unclear to be thought about and had to be made physical.” The true key to their creative process, however, is a space of mutual collaboration—one that is shaped not by rigid planning but by the evolving work itself. “The work is like a big space in between us, where we both add different things, thoughts, ideas and then something forms; even though our roles are clearly defined, the process is a mutual place.”

Complementing and adding another layer of emotional depth to Djurberg’s elaborate narrative environments, Berg’s compositions either amplify the drama or create an awkward contrast with the scene, heightening the sense of discontinuity that provokes critical questioning. This interplay allows them to confront and explore the possibilities of their creative subconscious, translating elusive instincts into tangible forms across different media.

Throughout the conversation, both artists remain adament that investigating behaviors and power dynamics within society is the driving force behind their work. But why? Berg poses the question to himself toward the end, only to conclude that there is no honest answer—most human behavior is shaped by the subconscious, instinct and often illogical motivations that enable detours, creation and transformation. “I find it so fascinating that we have all these rules and systems and behaviors that we constructed, but then again, half of the time, everything we do, we are unaware of what we are doing,” he says. “It’s on auto-pilot or just something we learned. A subconscious within ourselves drives us that we know nothing about.”

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s “Only For The Wicked” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar through February 21.