OLIVER VAN DEN BERG | ULRICH GEBERT | ED PANAR | MANUEL SAIZ
02. 09. - 16.10. 2016
The Kassel Kunstverein shows four artistic positions, which deal in different ways with the relationship between man and nature.
ED PANAR throws man's gaze back at the animal by fixing animals as surprised and surprising observers of the image viewer. Who is watching who, with what intentions and consequences? OLIVER VAN DEN BERG explores the complex relationships between the artificial and the natural by making body parts of animals into sculptures or reflecting the animal semantics through war equipment. ULRICH GEBERT deals with the instrumental seizure of the animal body and its habitat. The natural comes into picture with the resistance to shaping and disgust well as a modern fading step in the form of the cultivated enclosure. MANUEL SAIZ, in direct comparison of human and animal bodies, makes the viewer a phenomenologist, who is looking for differences and similarities in the species: How animal is human, how human is the animal? And in what sphere do they meet?
The artists of the exhibition ZOOZOOZOO reflect with different aesthetic practices and strategies on the modern relationships of the animal and human beings and in doing so they focus on the discursively often marginalized creatures themselves. With animal bodies, glances and biotopes, they give the natural a face and a voice. As a reflexive culture, man maintains a stress-laden relationship with nature. He puts them at a distance, by designing them, domesticating them, utilizing them, consuming them, civilizing them, or cultivating them as an image. At the same time, he remains connected to the natural nature - in its own physique and the associated basis of life. In the age of technical reproducibility of the natural and the ecological the conflicting relationship of man and nature ist intensifying. Gene design and "eating animals" are only a few of the subjects in which the nature relationship is renegotiated.
The exhibition ZOOZOOZOO unfolds an observation space that reveals anthropocentric perspectives by addressing man and animal, nature and culture in their interrelatedness. In addition to and with this orientation, the works have the fact in common that they are able to deal with ironic ease with the gravity of ethical questions arising from power asymmetries and their exploitation by man.