An Animal Is Living In My Belly is an exhibition that brings together the key aspects of Sonia Rammer’s artistic practice: animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanism. These contexts helps us grasp both the artist’s emotions and the significance attributed to human and non-human communities that existed before and will exist after the civilisation defined by the industrial revolution. Moreover, the exhibition is a story about intuition and experience of humanity, which first and foremost means a relation to the unknown, the other, and earth as such.
The show is made up of new iterations of the works Bones (2005), I Would Rather Be a Yeti (2019), The Woman Who Thought She Was a Dog (2022-2026), IT (2024-2026), and the premiere project The Heart of a Female Rat (2026).
Sonia Rammer’s creative method is key to these narratives. Video performance being the artist’s major mode of operation, Rammer embodies hybrid, animal-human beings in their “natural” environment. The artist then maintains a 1:1 relationship with both the camera and the subject of the action, controlling the entire process from both a technical and artistic perspective. For the past seven years, she has developed her own body of work documenting experiments in non-humanity and attempts to get into another’s skin, demonstrating that the animal body and physiology are not merely subjects of observation but also a space for creative identification. The artist’s residencies in diverse natural and cultural settings around the world have provided the primary toolbox for these experiments. The venues include Marpha in Nepal, Oqaatsut in Greenland, the Atacama Desert in Chile, and abandoned mines in Lower Silesia, Poland.
By combining the practice of experiencing ideas firsthand with an academic approach to anthropological and psychological analysis, as well as her training in painting, Rammer has developed an original and deeply personal narrative language. In this way, she spins a story about the tenuous boundaries between species, culture and nature, fiction and reality. Sharing the ambivalence of this state and the resulting unease is the core of the exhibition An Animal Is Living In My Belly. And yet, each of the works on display is built upon a distinct story and cultural context, which open up vast fields of interpretation.
The canvas Bone is one of the series of paintings that address both the natural legacy of the Earth and anthropology. The series was inspired e.g. by Women Who Run With the Wolves, a book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. In I Would Rather Be a Yeti, Rammer explores the interface between fiction and reality. The raw space of the Himalayas and the yeti symbolism are tools to dismantle the binary, western opposition. The artist breathes life in a mythological hybrid and its meanings, which merge the perspective of a local community and nature. The Woman Who Thought She Was a Dog is a project where Rammer documents herself as a female dog in the austere, arctic landscapes of Greenland.
The artist acts in this work via negligible interferences into the landscape, building painterly compositions. The installation IT confronts ruins of saltpetre towns in Chile with the disintegration of architectural and social structures, implying that disintegration itself can be generative. It creates connections between what has been destroyed and what is emerging from the cracks. In the video performance, dressed as a lizard, Rammer ventures into darker realms of ecosystem interdependencies. Questions arise about the aesthetics of decay and transformation, which in the dominant reality are relegated to the margins of visibility and significance.
The Heart of a Female Rat is the most recent work, one that examines the ambivalent relationship between humans and rats, i.e. animals that are both natural companions to civilization and symbols of all that is filthy and deserving of extermination.
Moreover, the exhibition An Animal Is Living In My Belly is the first opportunity to examine Rammer’s unique method of creating video performance. Visual ambiguity, which serves as both the overarching goal and the vehicle for the content, is achieved e.g. by disrupting the relationship between figure and background, distorting the sense of verticality, flattening planes, working with light, selecting the appropriate costume, and employing specific movements that attempt to transcend genre boundaries.
curator: Przemysław Jędrowski
