#AnimalsAndUs #ArtShow Opens at @TCMargate A Cornucopia of Depictions and Relationships with the Oldest Inhabitants on Earth
Animals & Us is an ambitious project which depicts the way we visually presented, and present in Contemporary Art, those wonderful living creatures that we share planet Earth with us among others. The earliest drawings in caves and rocks already shown animals and our complex relationship with them. The exhibition which open last week at Margate Turner Contemporary, the friendliest museum in the UK, is worth a visit.
Starting as early as the 6th Century BC with Egyptian and Boeotian, a district around Thebes in ancient Greece, statuettes; Chinese miniatures; Medieval books; Romanticism including Turner; to jump all the way to Modern and Contemporary Art is a superb survey on visual narratives on mankind history.
It’s a realisation that the world is not for us alone
as the writer of H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald reflects on the thoughts that Animal & Us provokes.
The exhibition focuses on contemporary and 20th century art with select historical artworks, new works and commissions. It comes at a time when around 38% of all known species are on the verge of extinction. With the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, Animals & Us is a re-examination by over 40 artists of how humans coexist and connect with other living species.
Our lives and interactions with animals, our closeness and distance from them are explored in pieces like Mishka Henner’s aerial photographs of Texan cattle feedlots that visualise our disconnection from the food we eat, and Candida Hӧfer’s photographic series Zoologischer Garten (1990–1999) that shows zoo animals in their artificial environments. Our close bond with our pets is reflected by artists such as Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin and William Wegman, whose own pets have been an inspiration for their work.
Many of the artists are attempting to connect with animals, to understand something of their internal mental lives. I like America and America Likes Me (1974) sees Joseph Beuys spend three days in a room with a wild coyote. A newly commissioned sculpture by Stephanie Quayle, in partnership with Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury, encourages visitors to look into the eyes of a troop of chimpanzees taking over the gallery.
Installed across all Turner Contemporary’s first floor galleries, Animals & Us encompasses a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to video and installation. Drawing on subjects from biology and evolution, to anthropology and technology, it asks questions about how we relate to or differentiate ourselves from other living beings.
The exhibition will be on until the 30th of September. For more information, please visit their website on www.turnercontemporary.org
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