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4/3/2011

Nathalie Djurberg / Wim T. Schippers

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Nathalie Djurberg
Snakes knows it's Yoga
Music by Hans Berg

This spring Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents an overview of animated films by Nathalie Djurberg, in which her most recent installation, 'Snakes knows it's Yoga' (2010), takes centre stage. This installation and her other films were realised in association with the composer Hans Berg.

Djurberg and Berg have created an installation for the 1,500m2 of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's spacious Bodon Gallery. The 'Snakes knows it's Yoga' installation is composed of 42 sculptures set on wooden bases in Plexiglas display cases, which are illuminated by coloured fluorescent tubes. These displays are flanked by projected animations and the air is filled with experimental music by Hans Berg. Alongside their most recent work they are screening ten films from the period 2004 to the present.

Contemporary surrealism
The Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978) is best known for her animated films. These may seem sweet and innocuous on first acquaintance, but in her work Djurberg addresses themes such as obsession, power, pleasure, desire and violence. In her films she creates animated, surrealistic 'fables'. Her world involves clichéd fairytales that derail into a battleground filled with death, sex and violence. In 'Snakes knows it's Yoga', Djurberg explores the fear of death. In one of the films a naked young woman plays the lead role, going on an ecstatic dance with a colourful frog. She tries to lick the poisonous frog in order to reach higher spheres, like a shamanistic ritual. In another film a snake hypnotises a skinny man who is meditating, eventually overpowers this yogi and tears him apart.

Stop-motion
Nathalie Djurberg creates her world using stop-motion, a labour-intensive technique that involves building up the film shot by shot. Made of coloured clay, the figurines are remodelled into a new pose for each shot, resulting in a jolty animation with a shaky backdrop and visible supporting threads. Imperfections in the plasticine of the figurines and linguistic errors in the texts are left uncorrected, which makes the surreal films by Djurberg more vulnerable and more human.

Colour, light and music
In this first major overview of her work it is not only the films but also the colourful lighting that are important elements. Hans Berg's music serves as a guideline for the audience. His experimental compositions provide an added layer that allows the viewer to more easily identify with the lead character(s) in Djurberg's animations.

Djurberg & Berg
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg live and work in Berlin. Djurberg studied at the Malmö Art Academy. The Swedish composer Hans Berg produces experimental soundtracks for Djurberg's films. They have staged solo presentations 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). Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg won the Silver Lion for best young artist at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

ArtTube
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has its own video channel on the internet:
www.arttube.boijmans.nl
A video portray of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg will be streamed at
www.arttube.boijmans.nl
and will be part of the exhibition.

Collaboration
The 'Snakes knows it's Yoga' exhibition is being organised in conjunction with the kestnergesellschaft in Hanover and the Kunstforeningen GL Strand in Copenhagen. A jointly published catalogue is available from the museum shop (ISBN 978-3-86984-198-4).

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The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
From Saturday, 5 March 2011

An exhibition centred around the controversial ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ by Wim T. Schippers will be opened during the Rotterdam Museum Night. This is the first time that the floor sculpture, which was recently acquired by the museum, has been exhibited in Rotterdam.

The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ (1962) by Wim T. Schippers was acquired for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection in December 2010. From this spring, the floor will be on show in a presentation that includes other works by the artist from the collection, such as the floating stone, ‘Het Is Me Wat / And Now What’s Up’ (1999), and ‘Eggs’ (1966), a white carpet of interwoven swabs that is strewn with green eggs. Covering a floor with peanut butter is an example of the conceptual modus operandi of this artist, who through his art aims to show that in principle everything is meaningless and absurd, but is therefore worth the effort nevertheless. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is delighted about the acquisition and the exhibition. ‘This is one of the most important acquisitions made in 2010,’ said Sjarel Ex, the museum’s Director.

Interactive
The peanut butter installation by Wim T. Schippers is a work which can be realised in various ways. In Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in contrast with other realisations, the floor sculpture will not be perfectly square. The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ consists of a frame-like structure that is filled to the desired thickness with a given quantity of peanut butter. The presentation includes a video of interviews with Wim T. Schippers and with the art collector Harry Ruhé, thus shedding light on the work’s creation and meaning. This film also reveals how the floor was realised and it will be posted on the museum’s ArtTube video channel. Because the ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ tends to stir up emotional responses and prompt questions among the public, museum visitors can record a video (called: ‘Peanut-Butter Post’) with a question for Wim T. Schippers. Schippers will answer selected questions via a webcam, and these questions and answers will be screened in the gallery as well as on ArtTube.

Endive and spinach
The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ boasts a long and notorious history. It was conceived about 40 years ago and was first realised at Gallery Mickery in Loenersloot, the Netherlands. The Centraal Museum in Utrecht also installed the floor during its Schippers retrospective in 1997. The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ was conceived in a specific context and is part of a whole series of floor sculptures by Schippers. He began producing floor sculptures in 1962 at Museum Fodor, where he completely covered one gallery in salt and filled another with broken pieces of sheet glass, and it was here that the idea for the ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ originated. At a later exhibition in Galerie Amstel ’47 (Amsterdam), Schippers once again worked with materials on the floor and for an exhibition in Felix Valk’s Gallery ’20 (the later Galerie Jaki Kornblitt) he conceived a floor of cooked spinach. The gallery owner did not think this was such a good idea, so the artist proposed using endive.

Setting tongues wagging
Wim T. Schippers (1942) is a television and radio producer, author and visual artist. His voice is renowned as the voice of Ernie in the Dutch version of Sesame Street and from Dutch TV programmes of the 1960s and ’70s such as Hoepla, Fred Haché and Sjef van Oekel. As an artist, Schippers is renowned for his hotly discussed conceptual works, such as the floating rock sculpture, ‘Het Is Me Wat / And Now What’s Up’ from 1999, a colossal chunk of stony material that is held in a hovering position above a plinth by three large electromagnets. This work was lent out for the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010, but has now returned to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Central to Wim T. Schippers philosophy is that life makes no sense at all, which has on several occasions given rise to heated controversy about his work.

The ‘Peanut-Butter Platform’ was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation and Unilever.

For more information or/ and images, please contact the Marketing and Communication Department: mail pressoffice@boijmans.nl or call to +31 (0)10 44.19.561 / 44.19.428.

Image: Nathalie Djurberg

Opening 5 March 2011

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museumpark 18-20 3015 CX Rotterdam
Opening hours
Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 am to 5 pm.

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