The Power Plant

This screening examines the playful and perverse forms of mimicry that complicate distinctions between human and non-human animals. In the twenty-first century, the limits between human and non-human animals are collapsing; increasingly we project the most eccentric human qualities onto animals, and then try to explain our species’ own bizarre behaviour through reference to their “natural” ones. The result is a messy kind of inter-species drag. Spanning over a century of moving images, and drawing on scientific and novelty films as well as recent international video work by artists such as Douglas Gordon, Kristin Lucas, Guy Ben-Ner, Kathy High, and Steve Reinke & Jessie Mott, the program features a strange parade of animal-human hybrids.