14. September - 24. Oktober 2024

TINA RIBARITS. Electric Entity

Tina Ribarits, London Zoo Ibis (self-filmed), 2024, pastel, watercolor pencil and acrylic on paper, framed, 75 x 105 cm

„Electric Entity“ beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung jener Lebewesen, die wir unbeholfen als Tiere bezeichnen¹. Jene, denen wir von Angesicht zu Angesicht begegnen, jene, deren Anzahl rapide zurückgeht oder die schon komplett verschwunden sind, und jene, die sich munter in Form digitaler Stellvertreter multiplizieren. Im Digitalen als auch Analogen spürt Tina Ribarits diesen hybriden Wesen in ihrer radikalen Andersartigkeit nach, beispielsweise in der Gestalt von lebensgroßen Vögeln. Der Pelikan aus der Videoinstallation „Electric Entity [Pelican]“ etwa wurde im Londoner Zoo aufgenommen und taucht in mutierter Form in einem interaktiven Environment erneut auf. Die großformatigen Pastellzeichnungen wiederum entstanden anhand geloopter Videoclips: Tieraufnahmen aus Social Media, Tierparks und Naturdokumentationen. Allesamt bereits gefangen in der menschlichen Repräsentationsmaschinerie.

Unsere Blicke sind Komplizen eines Regimes, das streng zwischen menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Lebendigkeit unterscheidet. Wer schaut zurück, welche Körper und Intelligenzen dürfen diese Grenzen überschreiten? „Electric Entity“ – ein Raum für menschliche Tiere, um über nicht-menschliche Tiere im 21. Jahrhundert nachzudenken.

“Electric Entity” deals with the representation of those living beings that we awkwardly refer to as animals¹. Those that we encounter face to face, those whose numbers are rapidly dwindling or have already disappeared completely, and those that cheerfully multiply in the form of digital proxies. Tina Ribarits traces these hybrid beings in their radical otherness in both digital and analog form, for example in the shape of life-size birds. The pelican from the video installation “Electric Entity [Pelican]”, for example, was recorded at London Zoo and reappears in mutated form in an interactive environment. The large-format pastel drawings, on the other hand, were created using looped video clips: animal footage from social media, zoos and nature documentaries. All of them already caught up in the machinery of human representation.

Our gazes are accomplices in a regime that makes a strict distinction between human and non-human liveliness. Who looks back, which bodies and intelligences are allowed to cross these boundaries? “Electric Entity” - a space for human animals to reflect on non-human animals in the 21st century.

¹Timothy Morton. Animacy, in Turner, Sellbach and Broglio. The Edinburgh companion to animal studies, 2019.

Encountering the Pelican

Ros Gray, Goldsmiths, University of London.

My first encounter with Tina Ribarits’ Electric Entity [Pelican] was startling, at once beguiling and disquieting. In this first version of the work the pelican stood in total darkness, a lone figure cut off from any contextualising landscape. And yet the bird was animate, its head turning subtly from one side to another, its body illuminated with dappled light, and from time to time its black eye would appear to look directly at me. Electric Entity [Pelican] declares itself to be an illusion – an image of a bird caught within a digital time loop – even while the inclusion of its name makes a connection to the real and the indexicality of photography, the brackets recalling taxonomic practices of natural history and the semantic gap between the signifier and the signified. Gradually, as my eye attuned to the darkness, the mechanism of projection revealed itself, and carefully rendered glitches sporadically disrupted the image – and yet the level of detail in the feathers and the glimmers of sunlight and shade across its body suggest the liveliness of an actual bird, rather than an avatar. As the pelican’s head rotates, the viewer is drawn in to considering its extraordinary physiognomy – how the head connects to the neck, the strangeness of the beak and gular pouch, the almost comical webbed feet.

In that first installation of Electric Entity [Pelican], the bird was almost human height, an enlarged scale belonging to a prehistoric era, recalling avian genealogy makes all birds the descendants of dinosaurs. The new version of the work presents the bird on a monitor close to life size so that viewer and bird encounter one another at eye level. The monitor makes a subtle shift of reference to contemporary forms of media display and the pervasive fascination with intimate representations of animals’ lives in countless nature documentaries and amateur videos, which are segmented and dispersed across social media as momentary lures to keep us scrolling, enticing our delight and identification. Antoine Traisnel’s book Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition describes the cultural shift away from the regime of the hunt, exemplified by the nineteenth century settler colonial ornithologist and artist John James Audubon, in which knowledge of animals and the foundation of natural history as an institutionalised scientific discipline depended on an embodied, violent proximity perpetuated through the hunting, killing, collection and visual display of ‘specimens’. The new era of photography that emerged the dawn of the sixth mass extinction reconfigured natural history around a different visual regime – that of visual capture. The photographic image, in Traisnel’s argument, involves a paradoxical attempt to capture the mysterious liveliness of animals at the historical moment of their disappearance from our daily lives. Given that birds have long served as powerful symbols in art, it is significant that Ribarits focuses on visual encounters with avian species that are relatively unburdened with precise symbolism even though they often speak to the enduring seductiveness of tropical plenitude in Western imaginaries. Detached from its context and its lifeworld, the pelican is captured in representation, but confronted with its alterity and held its inscrutable gaze, the bird also captures us.