Encounters / Begegnungen invites six artists from Austria and the UK, to explore the relationship between human and animal in a variety of mediums and practices.
The exhibition draws inspiration from human-animal studies, fictional narratives about animals, subjective experiences with pets and philosophical, as well as psychological considerations about companion animals in relation to human beings.
The exhibition features work by Ryan C. Brown, Jack Jubb, Hatty Nestor, Katharina Schilling, Miriam Stoney and Juan Fransisco Vera. The exhibition is curated by Alexandra-Maria Toth.
Artist and writer Hatty Nestor explores the interrelationship between sickness, the non-human and disability. Nonlinear ideas of time, narrative and intimacy are detailed between the author and the cat in her story “Feline Friendly”, raising larger questions of what it means to find care in pets, and how pets – and our coexistence with them – can shed light on complicated questions of care and constraint.
Artist Juan Francisco Vera deals with the use of pets to relieve stress and questions the extent to which the animal is comfortable with this approach. In contrast Ryan C. Brown depicts an animal (a cat) away from humans, experiencing a vivid solitude. Katharina Schilling's works show twenty legs of horses and people, exploring the interactions and overlapping of the limbs, which form a pattern of togetherness.
In his paintings, Jack Jubb imagined a chimeric mass of confused forms that he hoped would reject the convention of animals being neat containers for meaning in painting and explore more uncomfortable psychological landscapes. The installation and text “Like a Dog” by Artist and Writer Miriam Stoney can be likened to a museum display of a renowned person’s writing desk – in this case an escritoire, laden with the personal artefacts of Dora. Dora is a canine character developed by Miriam Stoney as a proxy for her own poetry-writing practice. The text resembles an academic lecture on Dora’s life and oeuvre. With these two aspects the installation presents the infrastructure of writing and not its products, thus speculating on the process of becoming a poetic subject as one that willfully refuses the necessity of being human.
