Opening: Saturday November 14th, 17:00–20:00

Two years ago, three people came together to think about the dog. A dog. Dogs. How they enter our lives, and why, on what grounds we choose to follow them, let them enter our kitchens, beds, artist studios. How they leave. And all the hair in-between our teeth, in our meals, the dead birds, ties and knots in the cupboards.

I lick the drain your hair is stuck in is a repository of residues assembled by Stanislava Ovchinnikova with Maria Batchenko, Kush Badhwar, and dog Los’. The exhibition recollects a multi-year and multi-species working process in which conversations, domestic spaces, found objects and cityscapes were inverted, enlarged, burrowed into, and made illegible.

The resulting artworks explore how interconnected the human and canine worlds can become. In the video documentation of the performance The Animal That Therefore You Made Me (Follow), Stanislava Ovchinnikova appropriates a dog’s physicality while moving through the center of Helsinki. The artist sees the animal’s unsettled, constantly shifting position situated between numerous worlds—domestic and urban, human and more-than-human—as kin to the expansive but fragmented mental state of a displaced person such as herself, wondering whether more political freedom could be found in dogness. A neighboring video work by the artist and urbanist Kush Badhwar widens the view from one body to many by reflecting on the public display of a population count: the bodies that represent it and those hidden behind the digits.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the traces of human-canine relationships take center stage. Leash-based works, created in conversation with dog trainer Maria Batchenko, ask what the tools and materials that mediate cross-species bonds might reveal about their character: restrictive, safeguarding, freeing. A similar ambivalence is carried even further into the part of the space that, taken over by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, will function as a working studio throughout the exhibition’s opening hours.

This exhibition is supported by the Kone Foundation.