Ema Širec / MEAT

Ema Širec’s photographs present humans as pieces of meat ready to be sold on the neoliberal market, and the exhibition as a whole can be understood as a critique of anthropocentrism presented through a multimedia approach: video, sound, and sculpture. The artist usually tests the concept of her series in several media to follow the series’ development and their limits, and through this, she ensures a well-rounded message. The combination of the visual, the haptic and the auditory aims to go beyond bare observation, where the viewer could distance themselves simply as a voyeur of suffering and establish a moral stance that separates them from the presented issue. Touching the artworks is not forbidden, as the activation of the various senses makes passivity towards the concept and the artworks themselves impossible. An intensified atmosphere of an absurd environment is created, interpreted through photographs of a human body wrapped in foil, the sound of a dog gnawing on bones, the soft sculpture of a piece of animal flesh, and the bones themselves. The juxtaposition of animal meat products and the human body creates the blurring of boundaries between artificially created hierarchies of beings in an age where supposed human progress is accompanied by increasing levels of dehumanization.

The body wrapped in foil has no identifiable characteristics. We cannot assign it a gender, an age, a race – which further dehumanizes the human figure and allows us to project our own identity onto it. Where the motif borders on abstraction, we no longer perceive it as the human body and so we associatively recognize it as a collection of wrapped tissue – flesh that could belong to almost any biological species.