Photo exhibition: Beastly/Tierisch
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44, 8400 Winterthur, Switzerland map it | Official Website
from 30-05-2015 to 04-10-2015
TUE – SUN: 11 – 18 hrs; WED: 11 – 20 hrs.; MON: closed
[R]epresentations of animals are ubiquitous in our culture, from advertising hoardings, to newspapers and television, to hundreds of thousands of images uploaded every day to the internet. Human beings, it seems, are obsessed by the image of the animal. Animals are also consistently subjects of public controversy, whether in relation to animal rights, agro-industrialisation, conservation or genetic engineering.
Over the last two decades, artists have sought to question humankind’s relation to the animal world, reworking categories of representation in order to rethink human-animal relations as well as the nature of creative practice itself. Beastly/Tierisch explores these issues in recent photography and video, revealing how the traditionally anthropocentric nature of vision has been overturned. The exhibition examines the way in which animals become embroiled in human processes and passions, whether caged, consumed or otherwise caught up in a very human animal-industrial complex. It also explores how the animal appears in art as a figure of critique, either in the form of political allegory or through aesthetic transformation. In recent practice, a more ‘beastly’ position begins to emerge, pursued by those who seek a bio-centric perspective. In such work, artists attempt to think the animal creatively in its own terms, forging worlds of fantasy freed from humankind.
The exhibition is curated by Fotomuseum Winterthur and it is accompanied by a catalogue.
