Galeria Pedro Cera
''The Animal We Dream''
Participating artists: Alla Abdunabi, Arman Galstyan, André Romão, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Debashish Paul, Heike Kabisch, Iva Lulashi, Jo Messer, Keunmin Lee, Théo Mercier, Zenobia Lee
''The Animal We Dream'' brings together ten artists whose practices approach the body not as a fixed or self-contained form, but as something porous and unstable: capable of extending into landscape, architecture, animals, objects and other bodies. Across sculpture, painting, installation, performance and moving image, the exhibition considers metamorphosis not as an exceptional event, but as a continuous condition through which bodies, identities and matter are formed and reformed.
Throughout the exhibition, familiar distinctions begin to dissolve. Human forms acquire vegetal or animal characteristics; flesh becomes landscape; objects assume anthropomorphic qualities; geological matter is transformed into fictional archaeology; clothing operates as a second skin. Rather than representing hybridity, the works inhabit states in which categories such as human and non-human, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial can no longer be easily separated.
André Romão’s intersections of botanical, bodily and architectural forms establish this condition of permeability, while Théo Mercier’s transformation of sand into speculative landscapes extends it into the material environment itself. Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s animals emerge as carriers of mythology, ritual and cultural memory, complicating distinctions between human and non-human worlds.
The body becomes increasingly unstable in the works of Keunmin Lee, where flesh, organs and landscape-like structures collapse distinctions between interior and exterior. In Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures, human, animal and vegetal anatomies similarly converge, producing bodies caught between vulnerability, desire, decay and regeneration. Heike Kabisch, Sophie Loeb and Zenobia Lee further approach corporeality as a psychological and material space: fragmented, provisional and perpetually becoming. Alla Abdunabi introduces questions of memory and identity, considering how bodies are shaped not only materially, but through the histories, images and cultural structures they inherit.
With Debashish Paul, transformation becomes consciously performed. Through costume, sculpture, film and performance, the body becomes a site through which identities can be temporarily constructed and inhabited. Costume no longer conceals an authentic self beneath it but enables another body to come into existence.
Moving between body, landscape and performance, The Animal We Dream proposes identity—human or otherwise—not as something contained within a stable form, but as something continuously produced through encounters with what lies beyond it. The body emerges not as a boundary between self and world, but as the unstable territory across which the two continually meet and transform one another.