Carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce the group exhibition, Animal Mirror, featuring works by Jelena Bulajić, Diego Delas, Cecilia Edefalk, Asta Gröting, Thibault Hiss, Aki Inomata, Julia Kowalska, Lin May Saeed, Pakui Hardware, Paolo Salvador, Sequoia Scavullo, Erik Schmidt, Thomas Schütte, David Zink Yi, Paloma Varga Weisz.
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. In contemporary art, this field of tension is gaining significance 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 fifteen 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.