ANIMALIA

What is the relationship between humans and animals? A question that has occupied us for thousands of years and yet we never tire of it. The exhibition ANIMALIA also deals with this very question and explores modes of representation and narratives of this connection. First, however, a short diversions into the past: While we humans were the last creatures in the evolutionary chain, we simultaneously took over all the information and experiences that nature had recorded in animals. In prehistoric times, the relationship between humans and animals was mainly dominated by the latter; in this respect, humans were virtually dependent on the help of animals. Much later, only with Aristotle and the Christianisation of Europe, this equal status of animal and human gave way to a new hierarchy - now dictated by humans. A constructed dualism that allowed humans to subjugate the animal. With industrialisation, this very relationship distorted into a grotesque; pets became an integral part of many households on the one hand, and laid the foundation for industrial animal husbandry, slaughter and exploitation on the other. However, it is precisely this ambivalence that can be seen as the determinant of this human-animal relationship: While the relationship between animals and humans is romanticised, it is equally a scene of ignorance. Dogs, cats and the like are seen as companions of human beings. We identify human traits with animals or vice versa, include them in stories, make them protagonists, etc. What is certain, however, is that Tönnies' slaughterhouse paints a brutal counter-image to each of the preceding points and seems incompatible with them. And yet the puppy in the womb and the chicken in the cage are results of the same domestication. Two questions arise: 1) Can we ever get rid of the anthropomorphising view of the animal? 2) Are we even able to deal empathetically with animals without identifying with them? Both questions probably provoke a questioning of the concept of respect. What is certain, however, is that while animals are alienated from themselves, torn from nature, changed, manipulated, exploited or threatened, the creative dignity and vulnerability of animals and humans is common. The exhibition Animalia brings together works by the Polish artist Monika Chlebek and the German artist Nicolás Dupont. Both devote themselves in very different ways to the representation of animals and pets and make them protagonists of the canvas. They both attempt to reinterpret the starting point of the human-animal relationship that we have created over centuries and to create new perspectives. Monika Chlebek's close-ups of her dog quote the historical genre of the panel painting or portrait and make the animal the singular subject of the picture. Although its face seems immediately close to us due to its attested subject status, the surface of the canvas also functions as a layer of distance between us, the viewers, and the sitter; it constructs a level of reflection that excludes trivialisation. Rather, two equal parties look at each other, seeking to sound out commonalities and differences in their encounter. But who is looking at whom? A question that Jacques Derrida also once asked himself naked in his bathroom when a cat looked at him (French: regarder) and at the same time he felt a chain of shame reactions. A culture that once drew such clear boundaries between the human world and the animal kingdom, even denying the animal the possibility of knowing itself, seems to be overwhelmed by this encounter - it ultimately causes a fraying of that separation. If we look at Chlebek's dog portraits, something similar happens that Derrida experienced in the bathroom. Regarder, in French, means not only to look at, but also something that concerns one or makes one responsible for something. In other words, the image becomes a place where the definition of the animal is made clear through apparent deficits (no self-awareness or awareness of the world, no soul, no language, etc.) and thus through negative reference to the human being. The categorical disqualification as non-human is thus challenged, as is a confrontation with the unknown. In Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis (Engl. "The animal that I therefore am"), duality is suspended; if we look at Chlebek's series "Hand in the fur", where it is uncertain whether a hand is stroking dog fur or the fur itself belongs to the hand, perhaps something similar happens. In the paintings by Nicolás Dupont on display, dogs and horses mainly appear, situated in landscapes or architecture; whereby individual elements, such as a traffic light, a street or a flat, leave the place of action and the perspective of the diegesis unclear. In all the pictures, however, the animal protagonists are never fully part of the world around them. Isolated or humorously alienated, they seem out of place in the created cosmos: a horse looks into a mirror and faces a human-looking grimace, a dog sits alone in the middle of an empty wood-panelled room, a confused poodle is surrounded by flames. Since time immemorial, storytelling has been part of the human condition, and with it the narrative exploration of the world. The animal becomes a projection surface, we use it as a metaphor in fairy tales and fables, reflect ourselves in it and, as a result, develop ideas of "human as animal" or "animal as human". Dupont's narrative-fragmentary paintings oscillate between these two poles. Are the animals representations of human subjects? Or do they show us the alienation of the animal from itself? Like stills from a video or film, they give us only an excerpt of the story; a potential further plot, as well as a before, depends entirely on us recipients.