Secret Garden

Secret Garden by Nathalie Djurberg – still image from animation

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg came together as collaborators within the medium of claymation filmmaking. Since 2004, their collaboration has evolved through cinema and into increasingly interdisciplinary forms. Secret Garden, their first show in the southern hemisphere, recontextualises the duo’s film-making practice within an immersive installation.

The journey through the space of the installation is one of abstraction through to dense symbolism. Two early rooms introduce a theme of animations featuring abstract liquefied forms. Sometimes these are hidden within large ceramic vessels; sometimes they are placed alongside birds and melting ice creams. But the naïveté of these forms is slowly broken down through context and interplay with Berg’s unnerving score.

From here, the installation opens out into explorations of scale. In one room, the droplets from the first two rooms are projected floor-to-ceiling in darkness. The quality of the merging and dissipating droplets is immensely satisfying to watch, and sits in contrast to the rest of the installation in its total defiance of signification.

In the second of these large-scale rooms, we find two animations facing each other across a vast space. In one, a dishevelled rabbit jumps, falls, and tokes on carrots as though they were cigars. There is a dark humour here; the rabbit is caught in a familiar loop of intoxication and withdrawal, his discombobulated rainbow eyes spinning in their sockets. The other wall features a black and white animation of a waterfall. In the space between the two animations, a litany of over-size objects resonates with what we see in the rabbit animation – pillows, multi-colour acorns (which, when split from their caps, resemble medical pills), as well as giant, black versions of the melting white ice-creams from an earlier room. This sculptural work is a satisfying compliment to the rabbit animation, though it seems to exclude the animation of the waterfall. I felt compelled to move through this scattered landscape and position myself within it, and was disappointed to learn that this was forbidden. Berg’s composition is of particular note in this space, lending an uncanniness to what might otherwise be a simple, playful space.

This large, sculptural space feels like a satisfying conclusion to the spaces and motifs we have encountered thus far, such that the hidden cinema behind the space feels like an addendum. But perhaps there is something fitting in finding a densely populated corner of macabre delights within this sprawling garden. In a small room, a collection of Djurberg’s stop-motion films plays. These works feature grotesque figures – often female – birthing, subsuming and being absorbed by other people and animals. In one film, a corpse decomposes, is feasted on by maggots and woodland creatures, and then is re-animated and journeys through the forest. In another, a mother’s children climb one-by-one back into her uterus, leaving her alone to sprout their limbs. Clay and stop-motion animation are the perfect medium for Djurberg’s content. There is a defiance of polish here; an insistence upon imprecise surfaces, jolting choreography and halting camera movements, all of which evoke the messiness of human bodies and desires. Amongst all this, Berg’s scores are always a seamless counterpoint; delightfully light when the subject matter is dark or violent, and vice versa.

There is some degree of aesthetic unity that ties the installation to the films in the cinema, but I ultimately felt that the two spaces sat as quite distinct experiences, and might have preferred that they be signposted or arranged as such. Regardless, Djurberg and Berg’s work satisfies with its sense of physical substance and symbolically rich landscapes of scale.  

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars​