The project brings together a constellation of artists who handle the fruitful topic of animal-humans relations. Their works of art are saturated with intensities, using a range of art devices derived from reality and fiction, narrative and criticism, wisdom, rituals, phantasmagorias, science, feelings or passions, exoticism all the way to banal truths. In a swelling environment of strangeness the art objects depict phenomena of an entirely different nature and reveal specific differences. The exhibition offers a space in which all is possible, from emotional charge to critical questions, from new aesthetic principles to responsibility and obligations towards other beings. Playing with their own context of aesthetic art objects with a conceivable somatic identity, they direct our thoughts to the body with its frailty and vulnerability. Their strategy is to liberate the living forms from nature, to liberate animals from humans, from the domination of the discursive, and ultimately to liberate art from the representative. Their works reflect on disturbing, hidden, secret, impenetrable, unsettling issues, shunned in the formal routines of contemporary everyday life, occasionally comprehended as taboo in an unwritten ethical codex. The exhibition offers to the spectator a disturbing topography of terra incognita. It evokes a broad spectrum of disturbing subject matter like disgust, disembodiment, mortality, constraint, the unfathomable, vulnerability, fears, disease, decomposition, deterioration, aggression, superstition, cruelty, commodification, mutilations, variability, beauty. The viewer will be seduced to confront things that apparently will never be fully uncovered, things provoking embarrassment, escaping through the cracks of a fractured organization of knowledge, a broken order of things ringing false in the context of Western rationality. The confrontation with the simple fact of the uniformity and ambiguity of death for instance leaves us dizzy. These are no gloomy thoughts, but rather a world of wonder that “seems a melancholic negation of Utopian arguments” in the face of the circumstance of the terrifying mutability of live matter. A glaring mold of immaterial, indistinguishable, fragmentary ephemera underlining the temporality of thinking.

ich tier! (du mensch) – du tier! (ich mensch)

i animal! (you human) – you animal! (i human)

аз животно! (ти човек) – ти животно! (аз човек)

a group show spanning two spaces

Perla-Mode, Langstrasse 84 / Brauerstrasse 37, 8004 Zurich
Dienstgebäude, Weichengasse 4, 8004 Zürich.

9-25 April 2010

Artists: bankleer, Sabina Baumann, Beni Bischof, eggerschlatter, Christian Eisenberger, Klara Hobza, huber.huber, Line Skywalker Karlstrøm, Jakob Lena Knebl, Flo Maak, Lin May, Silke Nowak, Evi Rüsseler, Hans Scheirl, Gisèle Schindler, Bertold Stallmach, Jens Ullrich, Nives Widauer.

Curators:
“Ich Tier! (Du Mensch)” at Perla-Mode: Dimitrina Sevova
“Du Tier! (Ich Mensch)” at Dienstgebäude: Cathérine Hug, Isabel Reiss

Special events in collaboration with corner college and corner cinema:

Friday, 9 April, 7 pm: performance Social Disorder and a World Turned Upside Down by eggerschlatter for the opening, Friday, 9 April, 7 pm; the audience and passersby are invited to actively participate in hauling two workhorses from Perla-Mode to Dienstgebäude and back, connecting the two spaces through a procession along Langstrasse
Saturday, 10 April, 8 pm: movie screening of After Effect by Stephan Geene
Friday, 23 April, 7:30 pm: video / performance / lecture by Mirjam Hofmann: HUMANDOG - If you want to know what is human you have to approach it on all four
Sunday, 25 April, 7 pm: lecture by Judith Jack Halberstam: Creative Anthropomorphism - animal forms of sociality and cross species desires
Wednesdays, 14 and 21 April, 6 pm till late: bar and small talk at Perla-Mode, with a surprise program (9 pm: experimental feature movie)

Opening night with DJ Party: with the hot and fresh dj scarlett