Portfolio: “I am the Dog that Was Always Here”: Three Contemporary Video Works and One Painting by Goya

The portfolio offers another view of the blurring of boundaries between the animal and the human by focusing on three contemporary video works about the lives of the packs of stray dogs in artistic and ethological buffer zones that are also urban and political border zones: Annika Eriksson, from Sweden, becomes friendly with abandoned dogs on the outskirts of Istanbul during the great protests that were directed, inter alia, at the accelerated and corrupt development of the city; Wim Katriz, from Belgium, documents wild dogs in the deserts of Kuwait, riven by wars and industrial exploitation; and Itai Marom, of Israel, observes dogs living in the borderless no man’s land, steeped in violence, between Palestinian Hebron and Jewish Kiryat Arba. According to Reich, all three focus our gaze on “man’s best friend” and on the dogs’ own gazes at the human, to reveal our shared wild and violent past, which has never ceased to lie in wait for us under the sidewalks of the cities and behind the taming and domestication.