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.