Song of the Sirens

Gió Marconi Gallery is pleased to present Song of the Sirens, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

**Continuing a longstanding dialogue and collaboration, the artists return to the historic spaces of Via Tadino 15, transforming the gallery into a landscape suspended between apparition and desire, memory and imagination.****Immersed in semi darkness, the exhibition unfolds through a series of stop-motion animations. Each film revolves around a single oversized sculptural element—a nose, an ear, a pair of buttocks—forms modelled in clay and rendered with a marble-like appearance, isolated and enlarged, deliberately altered and reinterpreted to enhance their evocative resonance. At once solemn and absurd, they seem to belong to a symbolic repertoire in which the body becomes fragment, relic, and enigma. The animations unfold through slow, ritualistic gestures, in a constant tension toward something that never fully materialises. Figures modelled in clay, whose features and physical attributes are intentionally exaggerated, orbit around these large anatomical fragments. Their presence contributes to the construction of an ambiguous and open-ended narrative, suspended between attraction and anticipation. Nothing reaches a conclusion, nothing fully reveals itself to the viewer: every action remains on the threshold of occurrence, held in a state of perpetual suspension that sustains desire rather than fulfilling it. Marble-like sculptures depicting fragments of the human body further punctuate the exhibition path, serving as points of orientation within an environment that oscillates between garden and vision, natural landscape and dreamlike scenario. Their forms translate and echo the anatomical motifs into a three-dimensional space that recur throughout the animations projected on the walls, establishing an ongoing dialogue between the gallery’s different rooms. Isolated, enlarged, and transformed bodily details re appear throughout the exhibition in different configurations, generating a recurring visual vocabulary that unifies the space and reinforces the sensation of inhabiting a suspended landscape, where images and objects seem to continuously mirror one another.Across the floor and along the walls, a field of monumental, oversized flowers punctuates the exhibition space. Emerging silently from a thin layer of mist, these forms transform the room into a garden suspended between reality and imagination. Their amplified scale alters the perception of the environment, contributing to a setting that is at once familiar and uncann y, where natural elements and fantastical visions coexist in a delicate state of balance. Song of the Sirens points to longing rather than to th e thing longed for. In this exhibition, the ‘ siren ’ becomes a metaphor for desire without a fixed object, a desire emancipated from possession and left open to possibility. It is that suspended moment between dusk and dawn when what one sees is not yet fully discernible, and imagination intervenes to complete what the eye cannot define. It is a space of suggestion, where desire is not shown but evoked, remembered, and transformed into narrative. Stories emerge from absence, fantasies intertwine with myth, a nd what appears unattainable finds a new dimension through image and fiction. Desire becomes creature, becomes warning, becomes poetry. What appears forbidden in life becomes sacred in the act of telling**