Lisson Gallery, London
Carnal claymation characters share exhibition space with lush silk paintings, shocking sculpture and a vast tapestry in which you are an exploding goat
Delights of an Undirected Mind is a group show promisingly centring around dreams, trance states and hallucinations. It takes its name from a film by Swedish artist duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, which is playing on loop on a small television screen just as you come through the gallery doors.
Djurberg creates brightly coloured clay puppets, with bulging eyes and spindly limbs, which perform in surreal animations set to a soundtrack composed by Berg. The narrative plays out mainly in a child’s bedroom, where a little girl is being put to bed by an elephant in a dressing gown, but it’s when a tiger starts suckling at a cow’s teats that things get really out of hand. In comes a giraffe, a gleaming black octopus, a unicorn, a pair of cucumbers spooning, a mouse caressing a piece of cheese with legs and a crocodile wielding a leather whip. There’s a lot of caressing and writhing around on the bed, and then a can of condensed milk spills its sticky contents all over the sheets. It’s a humorous and hedonistic scene that vividly illuminates the darker undertones of children’s fairytales, but also makes reference to modern-day greed and the hypersexualisation of culture.