APE MATTERS

Starting from his work Anthroprosaic from 2007, Florian Göttke will talk about understanding the relationship between human and animal through the lens of critical and cultural posthumanism. Anthroprosaic is a series of twelve small bronze sculptures presented in and around the model of a high-rise building. The work shows a band of ape-like beings in an abandoned human environment, where they interact with the remnants of our human society. The twelve scenes point to categories like language, violence, tool-use, or self-awareness, with which Western thought tried to define the human by constructing the separation towards its closest relatives, the apes.

Florian Göttke is a visual artist and researcher based in Amsterdam since 1993, when he entered the Gerrit Rietveld Academie to study Fine Art. Göttke investigates the functioning of public images and their relationship to social memory and politics. His lecture and book Toppled about the fallen statues of Saddam Hussein, is a critical study of image practices of appropriation and manipulation in our contemporary media society. Toppled was nominated for the Dutch Doc Award for documentary photography in 2011. Currently Göttke is working on his PhD in Artistic Research entitled “Burning Images – performing effigies as political protest” at the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Art Institute/MfA ArtEZ.