The Sea Between My Soul

"In modern culture, animals are used anthropomorphic manifestations of human character and emotion, often given names and attributed personalities. This humanizing tendency has metastasized through the popular imagination, in cartoons, zoology, children’s fables and the Internet. Using animals as conduits of human wisdom and story telling is a tradition as old as time itself, but at no other time has this mythology risen to the phantasmic heights it has today, where we actually truly believe that animals feel and function just like we do. That animals are virtual avatars of ourselves, completely mirroring our psychological conception of the world as we know it.

In this multi-sensorial work, this performative mirroring is accentuated by fusing black humor with absurdity to reflect our contemporary moment: on stage, taxidermy animals who are no longer alive narrate their story from beginning to end, using tropes of lyrical folk songs and a cacophonous rock musical. Much like they are seen in the displays of natural history museums, a drama unfolds through their silent bodies by simply hinting there is a voice or action emanating from them. Through specific poses, light, sound and the power of suggestion, human nature dictates that we see life in these creatures. They are no longer just mute mounted skins, they are singing, acting and momentarily - alive. Their gratuitous ‘death on display’ is erased through the illustration of life.

In much the same way as animals have been pushed out of view in recent times, so has death itself. Seeing death directly causes discomfort, even though humans are the main cause of so much of it in the world. The face of death is increasingly concealed from us, as we shy away from confronting it in every way possible. No matter how disconcerting it is, these animals embody a truer representation of death than any other. In order to narrate a story about death, there is no better narrator than the deceased themselves. As if resurrected from an unknown past, these animals chronicle their fatal journey by speaking from a dimension beyond the one we know. Removed from their natural habitat and displaced into an urban landscape somewhere by the sea, their appearance in this way somehow predicts the current dark moment of our times." - Raed Yassin