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Just as fairytales and fables use animal and human characters to explore problematic subjects, in Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg’s intentionally unpolished stop-motion animations, human and non-human characters also act out social and psychological taboos. Whereas most fairy stories have some moral message at their core, or at least a happy ending, there’s only ambiguity at the centre of Djurberg’s deliciously grim tales.
In the first of a quartet of five-minute films within Djurberg’s latest installation, ‘A World of Glass’, at Camden Arts Centre (set to music by partner Hans Berg), a naked woman sits in an icy room with a table of glass objects and an assortment of animals, including a reindeer, a warthog and a fox. When her leg gets caught in one of the jaws of the bear traps strewn around the floor, the fox bites it off. But is the animal hurting her or helping her? And when the reindeer carries her away on his back, is he saving her or is there something sexual going on?
More straightforwardly symbolic is the scene in another film when a white bull gores a naked woman. The text that appears in the background is equally suggestive: ‘Didn’t you know that I’m made of butter? I will melt in the sand and under your touch.’ It’s also unclear as to whose words those are – the woman’s, the bull’s or the artist’s. The effect is that the films simultaneously charm and disarm.
Djurberg’s animations, which run concurrently, are split between two darkened galleries, each of which contains long tables filled with translucent vase-like sculptures that look like glass – objects that also appear in all four films. Both galleries (and therefore each film) also have the same musical soundtrack; an echoing atmospheric instrumental that sounds like it might have been played on instruments made of ice. Not only do these devices unify the work as one installation, they also give the viewer the impression that they are not only watching the films but also standing in the sets in which they were made.