Composition and performance
Group show, 6th Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg, Russia, 2021

Sebastian Baumgarten, together with Ludwig Haugk and Robert Lippok speculate our possible future in their project Attitudes (2021). It presents five images from 2025 to 2425. These images survey the creatures of the Anthropocene as they struggle to survive in a world beyond human dominance and violence. Following Donna Haraway’s discussion in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), the artists wonder if there is a possibility of developing awareness and imagining kinship beyond purely human categories, to find new companions and relatives, to spin new threads. The Circus — a place between fascination and horror, where the natural boundaries between creatures seem to be suspended, where people fly and bears ride bicycles, — turns to be a perfect stage for this inquiry, at the same time reminding about the current disposition, where humans dominate over other living beings.