The Animal is Present 

The Animal is Present 
Gallery Duża Scena UAP, 24 Wodna Str.
Opening: 25.11.2024, 18:00 
Duration of exhibition: 26.11.2024 – 7.01.2025

Artists: a_bona_ment +48444, Dawid Dzwonkowski, Pussy Fanny, Kasia Goździak, Abril Gracia Arrondo, Ewa Greszta, Zuza Koprowska, Martyna Przybyło, Maria Strze, Agnieszka Topolska, Adrian Woźniak, Damla Ünlü, Maksymilian Zdanowski

Curatorial support:  III Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Animation and Intermedia, UAP:  Karolina Kubik, Marek Wasilewski

Production and arrangement support, poster: Dawid Dzwonkowski

Interspecies consultations: dog Oreo

Performative program: Department of Laboratory Animals

As Peter Singer wrote: “Our isolation is over… we have a new awareness of who we are and to whom we are related, that the difference between us and other species is small, and that the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is drawn in quite random way.”

Exhibition of the III Intermedia Studio is a summary of a two-year series of classes, seminars, meetings and field research devoted to animal-human relations. During this artistic research, we attempted to acknowledge the subjectivity of non-human people and recognize their relationship with us. Whenever humans interact with other humans, animals, or technology – there are always power dynamics at play. In this project, we are looking for a different kind of coexistence, wondering what connects us and whether it is true that plants created animals to carry seeds. We can no longer maintain an arbitrary division between culture and nature.

In 2010, during the performance The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic met another person face to face for 700 hours. Staring at the person on the other side became an extraordinary, emotionally triggering experience. The exhibition The Animal is Present, referring to the title of this famous activity, redirects attention from the anthropocentric concept of placing humans in the center of attention to looking carefully into the eyes of the animal. In the famous essay “Why Look at Animals”, John Berger wrote:

When an animal looks at a person, its eyes are attentive and cautious. The same animal may look at other species in the same way. It doesn’t reserve a special look for humans […] The human realizes that he is staring back. The animal looks at me through a narrow abyss of understanding.

In this exhibition, recognizing the abyss of misunderstanding, we strive intensely to see the animal in our lives, in front of us and within us. Donna Haraway, in “The Companion Species Manifesto”, writes about two important time-space scales co-created by humans, animals, and inanimate agencies – evolutionary time, planetary time, and the time marked by mortal bodies and individual lives, face to face time. This face to face time captured in various ways is the subject of our special attention. The exhibition shows various types of human-animal relations that take place both at the symbolic, emotional and purely practical and aesthetic levels.

The exhibition is accompanied by a rich performative program Department of Laboratory Animals [Amazona Assem, Dawid Dzwonkowski, Nikodem Krysztofowicz, Karolina Kubik, Martyna Przybyło, Maria Strze, Marek Wasilewski, Adrian Woźniak, Maksymilian Zdanowski]

Special thanks to Remigiusz Koziński and the Poznan Zoo. Graphics in the background of the event, still & video: Zuza Koprowska, Wolf Observations, 2023