Antonia Baehr Abecedarium Bestiarium

Antonia Baehr is an artist who in her many incarnations has embarked on a real undertaking to demolish “genre”. In her unclassifiable Laugh at the Kunstenfestival- desarts in 2009, she reinvented herself by performing “laugh scores” written by other people. For her latest creation, she has once again invited her nearest and dearest to write solos for her. But this time, as the basis for it, she offered them an ABC of extinct animals: D is for dodo, the large bird with atrophied wings, T is for Tasmanian tiger... with everyone able to identify with their unaltered “other”. From La Fontaine’s fables to zoological physiognomy or “animal drag”, there is a long history to man’s dealings with animals. In Abecedarium Bestiarium, Berlin-based Baehr – pronounced bear – questions the binary opposition between nature and culture that insinuates itself in the normative construction of types, races or classes. A freak show obituary of modernism.