If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you

Through the projection of human-like qualities onto animals, imaginary creatures and inanimate objects, the artworks in If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you evoke feelings of repulsion, attraction, innocence and the macabre. The human tendency to anthropomorphise can be found in diverse cultural forms, from Disney films to Furry fandom, and from the Frankenstein Syndrome to online avatars. It is a compelling concept through which artists can address a broad range of subjects, such as our complicated relationship with animals in the context of industry and mass culture, as well as our conflicting responses to the grotesque yet sympathetic.

The artists represented in the exhibition explore these concepts through different approaches. Erica Eyres’ video Destiny Green is a documentary-style parody of the story of a beauty pageant contestant who takes extreme and highly unconventional measures to attain ‘perfection’ by eventually having her entire face removed. In studying Francis Bacon’s portraits, Gilles Deleuze has noted that, by scrubbing away facial features and thereby emphasising the head — which, unlike the face, is “spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit” — the painter’s portraits play in the space of indiscernibility between human and animal. Like Bacon, Destiny Green scrubs away facial features — her own, surgically — in a quest for an ideal that takes her away from the messy ambiguity of human existence. The characters in the film are repulsive in their superficiality, but nonetheless, because we can (begrudgingly) recognise ourselves in them, they evoke sympathy.

Lorraine Sue-Fern Yeung’s short video embodies this notion of repulsive yet sympathetic. Or, perhaps more accurately, it demonstrates how the viewer’s reaction (either sympathetic or repulsed) can be transformed by the slightest alteration in perspective, a ‘parallax shift’ to use Zizek’s term. As the long dark hairs emerge from the shower drain, we are reminded of horror films (or simply the horror of having to clean the shower drain). Yet, as the hairs form a clump, the clump becomes sentient, electing to plug the drain from which it emerged. This simple gesture is the moment of transformation from horrible clump of hair, to weirdly endearing clump of hair.

Similarly, Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir’s invented hybrid characters exude charm tempered by abject elements, like excreting bodily fluids and sparse sections of coarse, dark hair. These drawings of not-quite-human yet not-quite-animal creatures suggest enigmatic narratives, like half-remembered children’s stories, having mutated and decayed in the recesses of one’s memory. Sigga Björg operates with an elaborate, individual iconography, so each of her drawings forms a part of a larger whole—a monstrous and, at the same time, humorous artistic world. Her weird characters recall minor magical creatures from Scandinavian mythology and folklore, which continue to influence poetics of local literature and visual arts to the present time.

Katinka Simonse’s (a.k.a. TINKEBELL) Popple uncomfortably reveals our strange, often irrational relationship to animals in contemporary society. The work demands to know why our pets should not become our purses, forcing us to confront our own feelings and beliefs about animal rights, fashion, industry, and, not least of all, death. By playfully and (admit it) humorously combining the cat with the dog, Simonse purposefully violates certain taboos related to death and corpses—which, according to the rules, ought to be treated with a certain degree of solemnity—in order to question the validity and, once again, irrational application of those taboos.

Shelly Nadashi’s performance, Furniture Music, is a story of love between a girl and a chair. Viewers will witness the development of their relationship, as the girl, performed by Nadashi, speaks to, falls in love with, and is controlled by the chair. In her performative work in general, Nadashi makes use of a self-professed magic to transform the human body, allowing it to inhabit objects, the bodies of animals and other humans. She uses her own body to question the power relationship between people and things; confusing the distinction between subject and object, her poetically economical performances ask the question, “Who dictates to whom?”

The ideas presented in the exhibition are expanded and contextualised by an accompanying book through short stories, philosophical texts, and fictionalised personal accounts.

Using sub-human, animal-human, and non-human characters, the artists in the exhibition and writers in the book create enigmatic, often absurd and sometimes disturbing narratives. Elements of what it means to be human become malleable and unstable, rendering any solid definition of humanity a matter of faith. But, if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.

The Curators