Jelena Bulajić, Diego Delas, Cecilia Edefalk, Asta Gröting, Thibault Hiss, Aki Inomata, Julia Kowalska, Lin May Saeed, Pakui Hardware, Paolo Salvador, Sequoia Scavullo, Erik Schmidt, Thomas Schütte, David Zink Yi, Paloma Varga Weisz

carlier | gebauer, Berlin

10 September – 14 November 2026
Opening: Thursday, 10 September 2026, 6–9 pm

Few relationships are as old, contradictory and unresolved as the one between humans and animals. We share our beds and our plates with them. We worship them and slaughter them. We search their eyes for answers they cannot give us, and precisely because of this, we project so much onto them.

Contemporary art has long recognised this field of tension as one of its central concerns, because it allows questions that reach far beyond zoology to be negotiated: how do we understand ourselves as a species? What does responsibility mean? Which fears and desires do we transfer onto other forms of life?

Animal Mirror brings together fifteen artistic positions that approach the relationship between humans and animals from radically different directions. Here, the animal appears as companion and confidant, but also as a source of food and sacrificial creature—two roles that, in our culture, are often only a few steps apart, yet are rarely considered together.

The animal is also presented as cuddly toy and symbol, charged with meanings drawn from mythology, religion and folklore, as well as a trigger for immediate, barely controllable emotions: affection, disgust, compassion and fear.

The exhibition considers the animal as part of a larger ecological and genetic fabric—as a fellow inhabitant of the same planet and a participant in a genetic pool to which we are more closely related than everyday perception might suggest. Ultimately, the most radical question emerges: what if the animal is not merely the subject of art, but its author? What if animal behaviour, movement and intelligence become the actual artistic material?

Aki Inomata allows animals to participate literally in the creative process, putting the very idea of human authorship into question. For many years, Lin May Saeed devoted her sculptural practice to questions of empathy and liberation in our relationship with animals. Pakui Hardware explore the body, biotechnology and the permeability of the boundary between the organic and the artificial.

Asta Gröting and Thomas Schütte approach the animal through physicality, instinct, drive and the grotesque. Paloma Varga Weisz and Julia Kowalska draw and sculpt hybrid creatures and metamorphoses between human and animal, continuing a long tradition of fabled beings.

In their paintings, Diego Delas, Sequoia Scavullo and Paolo Salvador create personal, often dreamlike visual worlds in which the animal and the human flow into and transform into one another. Thibault Hiss, Jelena Bulajić and David Zink Yi expand this field through sculptural, ceramic and installative approaches that render the animal tangible as matter, sound and presence in space.

Cecilia Edefalk and Erik Schmidt complement the exhibition with perspectives that place representation, memory and the act of looking at the centre of their work, foregrounding the instability of the images through which we attempt to define the animal world.

What unites these very different positions is their refusal of easy answers. The works are neither didactic nor one-dimensionally moralising. Instead, they open a space in which closeness and distance, tenderness and violence, science and myth can coexist—as contradictorily as our actual relationship with animals.

Ultimately, Animal Mirror is an exhibition about the act of looking: about the gaze we cast upon the animal and about what comes towards us from within that gaze. It is about looking at animals—and about what looks back.

Artists

Jelena Bulajić (b. 1990, Vrbas) lives and works in Belgrade and Herceg Novi.
Diego Delas (b. 1983, Aranda de Duero) lives and works in Málaga.
Cecilia Edefalk (b. 1955, Norrköping) lives and works in Stockholm.
Asta Gröting (b. 1961, Herford) lives and works in Berlin.
Thibault Hiss (b. 1997, Draguignan) lives and works in Paris.
Aki Inomata (b. 1983, Tokyo) lives and works in Tokyo.
Julia Kowalska (b. 1998, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw.
Lin May Saeed (b. 1973, Würzburg; d. 2023, Berlin).
Pakui Hardware, founded by artists born in 1977 and 1984, live and work in Vilnius.
Paolo Salvador (b. 1990, Lima) lives and works in Berlin.
Sequoia Scavullo (b. 1995, Baltimore) lives and works in Paris.
Erik Schmidt (b. 1968, Herford) lives and works in Berlin.
Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, Oldenburg) lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Paloma Varga Weisz (b. 1966, Mannheim) lives and works in Düsseldorf.
David Zink Yi (b. 1973, Lima) lives and works in Berlin.

carlier | gebauer, Berlin
Markgrafenstraße 67, 10969 Berlin, Germany