As human beings, we have been taught that our lives distinguish themselves from those of animals by; the ability to use language, the ability to reason, a sense of consciousness about oneself and a desire to transmit culture. Following Aristotle, French philosopher René Descartes asserted that human abilities are more extensive than those of animals, whom he denied any emotional life or consciousness. Novelist George Bataille determined only two aspects of human life as animalistic; sexuality and mortality. Rather unusual among these strongly anthropocentric currents, Jacques Derrida devoted himself to the question of whether animals can suffer.

Critical thinkers and writers such as Donna Haraway and Eileen Myles describe how human beings have historically failed to listen carefully enough to the animal. Their considerations position animals as companions with whom we can and must cooperate, while recent scientific research continues to show, that animals have their own agency and lead complex lives. According to Haraway, the relationship between humans and animals is co-constitutive and implies a two-way dependency: we form the animal as the animal form us.

In this exhibition six artists come together to address the relationship between the human and animal in a variety of mediums and practices.

Hatty Nestor explores the interrelationship between sickness, the non-human and disability. Non-linear ideas of time, narrative and intimacy are detailed between the author and the cat in her story "Feline Friendly", raising larger questions of what it means to find care in pets, and how pets – along with our coexistence with them – can shed light on complicated questions of care and constraint. Juan Francisco Vera relates to the topic by providing objects that play with the possibility of being (mis)used - a direct reference to unequal power relations in the human-animal relationship. Ryan C. Brown depicts an animal away from humans, experiencing a vivid solitude. Katharina Schilling's works show twenty legs of horses and people, exploring the interactions and overlapping of the limbs, which form a pattern of togetherness.

In his paintings, Jack Jubb imagined a chimeric mass of confused forms that he hoped would reject the convention of animals being neat containers for meaning in painting and explore more uncomfortable psychological landscapes. The installation and text “Like a Dog” by Miriam Stoney resembles a museum display of a renowned person’s writing desk. The feminized “secretary” writing desk bears the personal artefacts of Dora, a canine character with her own poetic practice, while the accompanying text speculates on Dora’s life and oeuvre. Together, these two aspects present the infrastructure of writing and not its products, thus imagining the process of becoming a poetic subject as one that refuses the necessity of being human.