SOLO EXHIBITION: Dooms of Love

Maja Smrekar / DOOMS OF LOVE
November 1, 2024 – April 20, 2025

For many years, Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar has been exploring the relationship between humans and non-humans, working at the intersection of science and technology. As some of her best-known projects involve humans and dogs, this exhibition focuses on Smrekar's personal imprint and emotional experiences of working with her animal companions. The show is simultaneously a homage to Smrekar’s dog Ada, who played a crucial role in several works and passed away early this summer.

Smrekar’s artistic exploration of the non-human other is characterized by respect, care, and empathy. In her works, she draws on a concept formulated by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s: "becoming animal." Deleuze and Guattari describe a process in which one can gradually detach oneself from – for example socially or politically - fixed identities or notions of order. These identities rely on a rigid, dualistic definition of categories and make strict distinctions between human – animal, man – woman, nature – culture. Dissolving these distinctions allows us to connect with the world in a new and more intense way. However, a crucial part or this is not intellectual understanding, but also bodily experience, as Smrekar undergoes in her performative works, for example.

Against this background, Maja Smrekar examines the relationship between humans and dogs from several perspectives throughout her body of work. She explores, for instance, the co-evolution of humans and dogs: through millennia of mutual adaptation, the genes of both species have changed in ways that compensate for deficiencies and promote living together. She delves deeper into this by investigating the molecular biological foundations that foster tolerance and empathy between species on an individual level.

By drawing on ecofeminist theories, Smrekar positions her works in a highly topical socio-political discourse. Deleuze and Guattari already criticized the dominant position of humans in Western philosophy, which places them at the top of all living beings. This critique was later taken up and further developed by ecofeminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. They argue that the exploitation of animals and nature is based on the same patriarchal structures and identity assignments as the oppression of women. They counter this system with a feminist ethics of care and solidarity, which also includes non-human others.

In line with these ideas, Smrekar not only questions the instrumentalization of the female and animal body in the exhibition, but also the traditional understanding of family and motherhood. With her hybrid family, which she formed with her dogs Ada and Byron, she suggests a model of an extended, solidarity-based community. Smrekar thus also understands her concept of “mOtherness” as an artistic contribution to responsibly shaping the future of our planet.

Heike Sütter

https://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/en/exhibitions/maja-smrekar-/-dooms-of-love