White Cat Dance

Shuttling between Dresden and Zurich, artist Isabelle Krieg works with installations, sculpture, photography, and performance. Her installation White Cat Dance (2016) questions our relationship with farm animals and pets. While cats and dogs are lavished with almost sacrilegious adoration, other animals like cows, pigs, and sheep are killed and eaten. The death of a farm animal is a matter of course – or a reality we try to repress – but the demise of a pet is an occasion for grief and mourning. In White Cat Dance, a mobile composed of the entire skeleton of a cat − around 240 bones in all – makes graceful arcs in the air. Although dead, the cat (whose bones the artist acquired from a company specialized in skeletons and anatomical models) continues to move and dance – as though it had been granted a tenth life. This poetic danse macabre confronts us with questions concerning our relations to animals, their lives and death, and our own mortality.