The animals become human ideals in a new art exhibition

Right now, there are several exhibitions and projects in the art world that focus on mixing art and science research. In Stockholm, the new Accelerator Art Hall has opened in the Frescati University area and at Bonnier Art Hall you look into the cosmos to answer the question of what responsibility we have for our planet.

At the Uppsala Art Museum, the new exhibition The non human animal takes up our relationship with the animals, partly in light of climate change. Eight artists, all active in the Northern Hemisphere, question the role of man in relation to animals and nature, primarily through sculpture and video works.

- When you live with animals you notice that they have an incredible sense of and a deep understanding of the earth. Something we have lost, says artist Lenore Malen, to the Culture News.

Lenore Malen is an American, active in New York and has for the past 20 years been interested in animals in their video works and installations. At Uppsala Art Museum, her art film Eve in sheepland, which belongs to the genre of ecological science fiction, is shown and places Eva and Adam from the biblical creation story in the middle of a sheepshell.

- Just as Margaret Atwood would say, science fiction is what we live in today. It is a world that may seem absurd but actually reminiscent of the one we have. I have a very dark sense of what people are doing to the world right now.

The cultural critic's art critic Ingela Lind is not surprised that animals and the natural sciences emerge more and more in the art world, and believe that the trend will continue.

- The exhibition at the Uppsala Art Museum is at the intersection of science and art. There are many exhibitions moving there, in some sort of rethinking of our thinking and knowing.

Our view of ourselves and what it means to be a human being is and will always always be a topical subject for art, she says.

- During the enlightenment, it was thought that man is different from animals because man has reason. But now human reason has collapsed, it has destroyed the world. Then you turn to the animals and ask what differentiates us from them, who in the light of day seems more innocent than man.

Progress in the natural sciences has also made artists interested in contemporary research. Several of the artists in the exhibition collaborate with scientific institutions.

Lenore Malen has studied Western philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Focault, and she is also versed on human origins and archaeological research. She points out that man could spread over such vast areas of land because of our aggressive nature. The interest in the animals comes from the fact that they deviate from us humans.

- The animals have a niche, a separate area. They live within a sphere for which they were genetically designed. I don't know what has happened to our genetic niche, but it has become uncontrollable, she says.