The Year of the Rat, part I

Piece and presentation

A presentation of the project took place at the exhibition The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow) at gallery Rotor II in Gothenburg. The rat was presented on a shelf covered in white velvet. Along with it there were texts and images on the wall, most of them are shown on the web page of the course The Animal That Therefore I Am. The installation was titled The Year of the Rat, part I.

The animal is here treated both as a sculpture material and as a representation of the Other in a culture obsessed with dividing all beings into human or non-human. The non-human, the animal, is mainly functioning as a tool to use when one is to define what is human; through the descriptions of what we are not, the act of becoming human is performed. The animal is either "disgusting" or "cute" and creates models of what type of being we define as close to human ("cute") or far away from human ("disgusting"), thereby defining our own humanness. I work with discussing the role of the animal and present it as an object, described through a wide spectrum of thoughts, texts and experiences.

A review of the exhibition can be read here (text in Swedish).