Animality

On show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, “Animality” lays down a new artistic and theoretical framework that questions our attitude towards animals.

The very earliest cave paintings reveal that humans have cohabitated with animals for millennia. Yet the relationship is fraught and contradictory: we simultaneously mythologize, venerate, sacrifice, and exploit those who are not of our species. This paradox suggests that our connection with animals might be more complicated, and far richer, than commonly thought, and that the distinction between human and animal is not at all clear-cut.

Taking this question as its premise, “Animality” lays down a novel artistic and theoretical framework that questions our relationship with animals.

If animals have been the protagonists of innumerable myths, subject to countless scientific studies, and featured in some of our most extraordinary works of art and literature, why have they not been more central to the way we humans study our own relationship with the world?

“Animality” stresses the importance of addressing ethical issues, and thinking beyond one’s own values and beliefs, to question accepted assumptions about our relationship to nonhuman creatures. It suggests that while many distinctions between humans and animals are valid, the two groups are more productively imagined as parts of an ontological whole.