TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Australian artist Catherine Bell mothers a piglet in her disturbing video This Little Piggy fades to pink; Slowenian artist Maja Smrekar breastfeeds a puppy in her radical work Hybrid Family. M(Other); Japanese artist Ai Hasegawa stages a cross-species pregnancy in her artistic research I wanna deliver a dolphin for which she also designs an artificial womb. And the artist group Sin Kabeza investigates a surgical transformation that would allow a male human body to carry baby marsupials in a pouch on the stomach. The relationship between “mother” and “child” in these projects always stays asymmetrical but the involved non-human animals exhibit some degrees of agency, cooperation, and resistance. Reflecting on these and other artworks that apply gendered stereotypes of care like the mother or the nurse and applying a Critical Animal Studies perspective the talk reviews gendered concepts of care and how they can be challenged in contemporary art. In my reading, the artists not so much affirm but rather decolonize traditional concepts of care. They queer the alleged naturalness of traditional ascriptions of the ‘labor of love’ by performing inappropriate interspecies intimacies with other animals. And more importantly, they help imagine post-anthropocentric multispecies families without conceiving the potential messiness of new kinships.
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