I keep a dream journal and a diary like it’s my religion, but I never read what I’ve written. Shame is too potent to risk discovery, and resistance breeds avoidance.

Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg are not as cowardly as I, or most of us, for that matter. Don’t Be Afraid, There Are Treasures Behind These Locked Doors, the artists’ current exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Beijing, sheds light so vulnerable it’s painful. In the show, Djurberg’s sculptures and stop-motion animations are paired with her partner Berg’s hallucinatory audio, fostering an all-encompassing sensory experience. Language weaves a movement pulled by and through multiple planes of conversation in their collaboration.

The sculptures included in this show consist of colorful flowers, fauna, birds, and bulbs, planted on Kleinian blue branches—a comforting motif. The permanence of impermanence, one can’t help but see a moment as forever. Something is stagnant until it’s swept away. 

“They are not as beautiful when you look up close,” Djurberg assures of sculptures like “A Stream Stood Still,” a blue branch with pale-colored flowers sprouting from the top.

The stories of Djurberg’s clay puppets on film are much less subtle and far more grotesque. The show includes carnivalesque and visceral animated sculptures, which hinge on Tim Burton-looking, nightmarish dreamscapes from childhood folklore: “A Pancake Moon” (2022), “The Dark Side of the Moon” (2017), and “How to Slay a Demon” (2019). As fantastical as they may be, upon closer inspection, the work isn’t as uncanny as it is intimately and deeply human. 

Making an idea can be a violent act. An idea is, as Djurberg says, “as beautiful as a fantasy,” because “it isn’t tied to anything physical.” To bring one down to speech is to mangle it in a mouth. Hands have to get dirty—as Jack Whitten, an American Abstract Expressionist acclaimed for his process, asserted correctly, “The memory is in the material.”

“It’s in the making, for us, that is the art itself,” Djurberg says, describing a dramatic oscillation between “the ecstasy and the disappointment,” a phrase which she repeats a few times. “That tension never ever reach[es] any form of perfection”––or a conclusion because there isn’t one. She’s made “polished” work before, but even perfect isn’t good enough. 

Berg also experiences “the agony, the joy, and the pain,” in composing the music that accompanies the animations. “If I only make really nice and pretty music, it’s boring,” he said. “There has to be something in there that scratches a little bit.” The word he looks for is friction. After all, we beat on against the current.When the process stops and the work is called finished, “the real horror begins,” Djurberg says. Hands must be wiped eventually, but they’re never fully clean.

Dialogue pasted into these animations is in English. Having learned the language from literature, movies, and poetry, the words can convey the art in a way Swedish perhaps cannot. “It comes from this other imaginary place,” Djurberg says. “There’s a freedom in it.”

But, like all translations, language itself fails to capture the absurdity of the moment. So one turns to music, a language “incredibly hard to describe with words,” Berg says, and for good reason. "You can’t talk about music directly, you have to talk about what music does to you…There are words in Swedish that you can’t translate,” he says. This is like some words in all languages. “We have to feel them.”

“I think that not being able to put words into something is so amazing,” Djurberg continues. “To feel something and be at a loss of words, to sort of follow that mystical thread underneath. I find myself fascinated with that…sort of…void.”

Roland Barthes calls writing “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin…that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away.” Is a name not a limit? Barthes proclaims, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” We look not just at the point at which it hits, but to where it goes, and therefore illuminates, in us. 

One work that compounds this notion, “How To Slay A Demon,” depicts various characters lying supine and susceptible to touch from various others. The camera replaces the victim’s head. Our eyes are watching through theirs. Identity is a ball passed back and forth between two cups on a glass table over foil. Inside the walls of its set, it’s a one-woman show. At first in denial, “I am this person but I am not this one,” Djurberg says. “After a while [I saw] that I’m playing both and [realized] we’re likely both in life as well. It all just becomes perspective.”

A question arises. Why make art? Is it just “the cream on top of cake on top of cake on top of ice cream,” as Djurberg calls it? Is the focus on an internal world a dismissal of the exterior? I am reminded again of Jack Whitten, a Black painter in 1960s America who said, “How can anyone justify staying in the studio when your people are dying? What is the artist supposed to do?” 

As Djurberg points out, small and large scales mirror each other’s structures; their functions are paralleled. The work is imbued with the turmoil which surrounds it. Internal excavation of the self-expressed mind is linked to the system that holds it in place. Art and politics are therefore inextricably tied. “You can’t avoid it,” she says of the innate politic of existence. “It’s almost like the air. The air changes and you’re breathing it. You can put yourself aside to a certain extent, but we are not as separate as we think we are.”

“Where there’s oppression in the world, art and culture is the thing they crack down on very fast,” Berg answers. “Those people certainly think art is very important.” Sound and light—a body is being moved on the waves. 

“It’s in the air,” Berg says. “It’s the atmosphere. That’s what the music does. We can create the atmosphere where the sculpture lives.” He is specifically speaking about an installation showing at the Ordrupgaard Museum in Denmark this year, but it’s true to all of their work. “It’s fun to work together and fill up all the space there is, all the dimensions there are.”

So tell me, what lies behind those locked doors?