There's an animal in my belly

Incarnations of Soni Rammer

An Animal Lives in My Belly is an exhibition that brings together key themes in Sonia Rammer's artistic practice: animal studies, ecocriticism and posthumanism. In their context, we can understand both the artist's emotions and the meanings attributed to the human and inhuman communities that were before and will be after the civilization defined by the Industrial Revolution. It is also a story about intuition and the experience of humanity. About the fact that to be human is above all to be in relationship with the unknown, the other and with the earth as such.

The exhibition consists of new iterations of the works Bone (2005/2026), I Would Rather Be a Yeti (2019), About the Woman Who Thought She Was a Dog (2022-2026), TO (2024-2026) and the premiere project Heart of a Rat (2026).

The key to these narratives is the creative method of Soni Rammer, for whom video performance has become the most important activity. During its creation, the artist embodies hybrid, animal-human beings in their “natural” environment. The artist then remains in a 1:1 relationship with both the camera and the subject of the action, controlling the entire process from the technical and artistic side. Thus, for seven years, author's documentation of testing non-humanity and attempts to enter the skin of another has been created, showing that the animal body and physiology are not only subjects of observation, but also a space for creative identification. Artistic residences in extremely diverse places and natural and cultural contexts around the world have become the primary tool of this kind of experiments. These include Marpha in Nepal, Oqaatsut in Greenland, the Atacama Desert in Chile and abandoned mines in Lower Silesia in Poland.

Overwriting the practice of experiencing ideas the hard way for an academic workshop of anthropological and psychological analysis and a painting education, Rammer developed an original and very personal language of storytelling. In this way, he creates a narrative about the fluidity of the boundaries between species, culture and nature, fiction and reality. Sharing the ambivalence of this state and the resulting anxiety is the focus of the exhibition In my belly lives an animal. Nevertheless, each of the presented works is built on a separate history and cultural background, which unleash vast fields of interpretation.

The Bone canvas is one of a series of paintings, relating both to the natural heritage of the Earth and to anthropological themes. The inspiration to paint the cycle was, among others, Running with Wolves, a book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. In I Would Rather Be Yeti Rammer explores the line between fiction and reality. The harsh space of the Himalayas and the symbolism of the yeti become a tool to dismantle this binary, western opposition. The artist brings to life a mythical hybrid and its meanings, which combine the perspective of the local community with nature. About the Woman Who Thought She Was a Dog is a project in which Rammer documents herself as a female dog in the harsh, arctic landscapes of Greenland. The artist works in this work through minimal interventions in the landscape, building painterly compositions.

In the installation TO, the artist confronts the ruins of saltpeter cities in Chile with the disintegration of architectural and social structures, suggesting that the decay itself can be generative. It creates relationships between what is destroyed and what is born in the cracks. In the video performance, Rammer, dressed as a lizard, moves into darker areas of ecosystem interdependence. Questions arise about the aesthetics of decay and transformations, which in the prevailing reality are pushed beyond the margin of visibility and materiality.

The Rat Heart is the latest work that explores the ambivalence of the human-rat relationship. An animal that is at the same time a natural companion of civilization, and at the same time a symbol of everything filthy and deserving of extermination.

The exhibition In My Belly Lives an Animal is also the first opportunity to look at Rammer's original method of creating a performance video. Visual non-obviousness, which is the overriding goal and carrier of content, is obtained, among other things, by disrupting the relationship between the figure and the background, disrupting the sense of verticality, flattening plans, working with light, choosing the right costume and a specific movement that becomes an attempt to transcend the genre.

curator: Przemysław Jędrowski