Veronika Hauer explores the ambivalence of fascination and violence in the human-animal relationship, which oscillates between taming, exploitation and mirroring, in her comprehensive body of work apes (2019–ongoing). In art-historical or everyday cultural references, unsettling objects and multi-perspective imagery, she reveals the subjugation of animals while also questioning the potentialities of an encounter on equal terms.

alphabets (2017–ongoing) takes its starting point in a literal literacy, in Veronika Hauer’s long-standing investigation of different linguistic levels using objects, graphics, performance and video. Letters appear as visual motifs, in which the letter oscillates between sign, object and image. The artist also adds her latest body of work here, revealing the fragility of letters in the metaphor of bones, naming them the skeleton of language, making their impermanence and arbitrariness visible and, at the same time, poetically and performatively tangible.