Animal Mirror

What Looks Back When We Look at Animals

Few relationships are as old, as contradictory, and as unresolved as the one between humans and animals. We share our bed with them and our plate. We worship them and we slaughter them. We search their eyes for an answer they cannot give us, and precisely because of that, we project so much into them. Contemporary art has long recognised this field of tension as one of its central concerns because it allows something to be negotiated that reaches far beyond zoology: our self-understanding as a species, our ethics, our fears, our longings.

The exhibition brings together thirteen artistic positions that approach this relationship from very different directions. Here, the animal appears as companion and confidant as much as source of food and sacrificial creature, two roles that in our culture often lie only a few steps apart, yet are rarely thought together. It appears as cuddly toy and as symbol, charged with meanings drawn from mythology, religion, and folklore, and at the same time as trigger for immediate, barely controllable emotions, affection, disgust, compassion and fear.

At the same time, the exhibition considers the animal as part of a larger ecological and genetic fabric: as a fellow inhabitant of a shared planet, as a participant in a genetic pool to which we are more closely related than everyday understanding often allows. And finally, the most radical question arises: what if the animal is not merely subject matter but the author itself, if animal behaviour, animal movement, and animal intelligence become the actual artistic material?

Aki Inomata literally lets animals co-create, putting human authorship itself up for debate. Lin May Saeed has devoted her sculptural work for years to questions of empathy and liberation in our relationship to animals. Pakui Hardware address the body, biotechnology, and the permeability between the organic and the artificial. Asta Gröting and Thomas Schütte approach the animal through physicality, drive, and the grotesque, while Paloma Varga Weisz and Julia Kowalska draw and sculpt hybrid creatures and metamorphoses between human and animal, descendants of a long tradition of fabled beings.

Diego Delas, Sequoia Scavullo, and Paolo Salvador develop, in painting, their own often dreamlike, shifted pictorial worlds in which the animal and the human flow into one another. Thibault Hiss, Jelena Bulajić, and David Zink Yi finally extend the field with sculptural, ceramic, and installative approaches that render the animal tangible as matter, as sound, as presence in space.

What unites these very different positions is their refusal of easy answers. None of the works is didactic, none moralises one-dimensionally. Instead, they open a space in which closeness and distance, tenderness and violence, science and myth are allowed to coexist, as contradictory as our actual relationship to the animal really is.

In the end, what remains is an exhibition about seeing itself: about the gaze we cast upon the animal, and about what comes toward us from within that gaze, an exhibition about looking at animals, and about what looks back.