Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg’s unsettling avian menagerie takes flight this fall at YBCA. Using actual bird species as inspiration for her sometimes grotesque forms, Djurberg explores physical and psychological transformation as well as pageantry, perversion, and abjection in avian society. In addition to the wild flock of more than eighty freestanding bird sculptures on view, the exhibition also includes five animated films, in which avian psychology is superimposed upon human behavior with extraordinary results. Her clay animations are set to music and sound effects by her partner and collaborator Hans Berg.

In conjunction with the exhibition The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, YBCA presents A Mad Tea Party: Five Videos by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, a selection of important works where complex and twisted narratives are performed by molding clay figures in constructed environments. Spanning the past eight years of the artists’ career, these animations depict their characteristically dark tales that plumb the depths of human psychology to dramatic effect, and include human and animal characters that are thrown together into strange and mythological scenarios laden with sexuality and violence.

Presentation by Claude Marks, director of The Freedom Archives, on a selection of recordings from the archive based around social activism.