Natalia Pastukhova's Good Dog Project features in Participate! 2013

Opening: 17th April 2013, 19:00

Baku Seaside Boulevard

Good Dog Installation Project

Natalia Pastukhova (Ekaterinburg, Russia)

Part of the project The Dream of Jumanji

Curator: Nailya Allakhverdieva

Coordinator: Margarita Mukhmadeeva

Good Dog is a mobile installation or graphic story of figures, on the fence, representing stray dogs. This project aims to point out one of the borders of the civilized Europeans consciousness: our relation to homeless animals. One of the characteristic differences between East and West is the issue of the dog. For the former, it is considered normal cuisine, for Europeans it is man’s friend. Europeans often humanise the dog: it can be bored, angry, love, cry, etc. For this society eating dogs is akin to cannibalism. Just as pets 'look like their owners', stray dogs act as a reflection of the city: they are portraits, caricatures of our society. The artist portrays stray dogs to offer us a closer look at each other. Good Dog is a portrait gallery of the city and its citizens.

This Russian artist brings the animal world into the urban environment through numerous animal sculptures. Playing on the ambivalence we have to the animal world, one of idealisation and nostalgia, set against control and fear, Allakhverdiyeva hopes to create a modern genre that reminds us of animalism’s close proximity to our everyday life. With this project we want to present something both vilified and idealised, and almost entirely invisible in the urban environment - the ‘animal’. The city is a place for human life, a place of comfortable and concentrated civilization, it opposes the world of wildlife just as man opposes ‘animal.’ Our position toward the ‘animal’ is ambivalent; the natural world and its inhabitants are often idealized in culture and philosophy, while the realities of human life and behaviour are described as an uncontrollable 'urban jungle'. In the history of culture this controversy is solved in the images of the Garden of Eden or its tangible contemporary version – the zoo. They represent a dream of overall harmony, coexisiting with the subconsciously perceived threat from all living beings to the human being. City governments from all over the world enact their fears through the sterilization of the urban environment, catching stray dogs and cats, setting devices to scare away sparrows, pigeons and crows from the runways of airfields, organising training courses on sanitation and hygiene and teaching on everything from protection against flies, to handling pets and preventive measures for rabies. The modern film industry further uses these phobias to create visceral dramas about the invasion of animals in the human world, classic examples being the films Jumanji or The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock.

The project runs from 17th April until 24th April 2013