all images above: Still from Snakes Know It’s Yoga, 2010
Clay animation, digital video, 6:30
music by HANS BERG

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Snakes Knows It’s Yoga,
exhibition view at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
September 3 – November 7, 2010. photo by ED JANSEN

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Snakes Knows It’s Yoga,
exhibition view at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
September 3 – November 7, 2010

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Snakes Knows It’s Yoga,
exhibition view at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
September 3 – November 7, 2010. photo by ED JANSEN

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Snakes Knows It’s Yoga,
exhibition view at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
September 3 – November 7, 2010. photo by ED JANSEN

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all images above: Untitled, 2010
Clay animation, digital video, 6:30
music by HANS BERG

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interview with NATHALIE DJURBERG and HANS BERG accompanying the exhibition Snakes Knows It’s Yoga at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

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The Swedish artist NATHALIE DJURBERG creates videos that are short, clay-animated films which may seem sweet and innocuous on first acquaintance, but treat themes such as obsession, power, pleasure, desire, and violence. Her partner HANS BERG composes music that accompanies the works.

Snakes Knows It’s Yoga (2010) and Untitled (2010) combine a world of exoticism and mysticism with almost painterly experiments in shapes and colours. The protagonists in Untitled are a nude young woman and a frog. The frog is central to a shaman tradition. By licking the creature to ingest its poison, the shaman achieves a psychedelic state of mind by which he can make contact with the spirit world. In Snakes Knows It’s Yoga, a man and a snake interact, a relationship that ends in violent and sudden death.

NATHALIE DJURBERG and Swedish composer HANS BERG live and work in Berlin. They had solo show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2009), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Prada Foundation in Milan (2008) and Kunsthalle Wien (2007). Their work can be found in the collections of institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm) and the Sprengel Museum (Hanover). They won the Silver Lion for best young artist at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

And good news: the exhibition Snakes Knows It’s Yoga opened at the Art Society Gammel Strand (Copenhagen, Danemark) on August 24 and is on view until November 13, 2011