Beastly – Tierisch

Representations of animals are ubiquitous: from advertising hoardings, newspapers, books, magazines, and television shows, to the hundreds of thousands of images uploaded every day to the Internet. During the last twenty years, artists, too, have engaged with the animal in an effort to articulate more “beastly” visions. How can animals as autonomous creative entities take possession of an unshackled imaginative space cut loose from the human? ‘Beastly / Tierisch’ has an innovative, visually daring design, superimposing a selection of artistic works onto a host of pictures from the Internet. This rich image material is supplemented by four essays: about animality and the history of photography (Duncan Forbes), the political and philosophical animal (Slavoj Žižek), the virtual zoo of the Internet (Ana Teixeira Pinto), and the changing identities of animals under anthropogenic pressures (Heather Davis).