Enrichment, 2022
Soloshow @ Akademie Graz.
Curator: Astrid Kury
IN THE MIRROR OF THE OTHER by Astrid Kury
Attraction and fear, taming and extermination. With the need to reorient ourselves towards nature, to experience our shared vulnerability, to develop a culture of the living, the human-animal relationship is also being discussed anew. Violence is one of its essential aspects. Reflection is another. Incorporation and disguise. The difference lies in the gaze that rests on animals. According to Thomas Macho, looking directly into the eyes, a human sign of the search for understanding and closeness, is a threat to the animal counterpart.* And so it is also the confrontational gaze of the monkeys in Veronika Hauer’s drawings that opens up the wide cultural-historical, socio-political and emotional spectrum of dealing with the different – especially using the example of beings that are so close to us. Using the technical term of enrichment, she expands her points of reference to keeping animals with and as entertainment. The artist creates the faces of monkeys from finely hatched or patterned segments in ink or colored pencil. Orphism, Cubism and Futurism are borrowed from art history for the expansion into multiple spatial dimensions and multi-perspectivity, which characterizes the work as a whole. The artist develops irritating objects from objects kept in zoos and cultural-historical images. She mixes all these inner and outer image worlds like playing cards, as a series of possible sets. The main theme is the aesthetic subjugation of the animal, a taming for the benefit of the curious, from violent disguise in the scapegoat-like all-too-human to the schematization of climbing monkey bodies, which are so well suited to decoration and trivialization. As nuances, however, the artist also hints at the positive aspects of enrichment. Because instead of replicating the exhibition of animals, it outlines the kind of encounter at eye level that could arise with a new ethic in dealing with living beings, up to and including its own legal status.
*Thomas Macho, Warum wir Tiere essen, Molden Verlag, Wien–Graz 2022, S. 68.
