Transforming natures

The Most Dangerous Animal presents a series of allegories on the dual condition of the human psyche: the liminal space between the ethical and bestial, between instinct and morality.

Working in assemblage and installation, Tuazon presents an exhibition of fictive artefacts and hybrid legends all fundamentally connected by accounts of transformation across states and scales. The objects are accompanied by extensive and rich textual narratives: a series of survivalist archetypes, mythic anecdotes, and quasi-ethnographic notes that collectively thread through complex states of human transformation. Drawing out connections between the historical and the folkloric, the exhibition hints at how more primal forces continue to inform civilisation and contemporaneity itself.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud first wrote about how natural instincts are suppressed and sublimated in the pursuit of civilisation, driving people into degrees of unhappiness, anxiety, and guilt. This state of dialectical transformation is implicitly referenced and visualised in Tuazon’s works, which reinvent as totems, diptychs, and icons of the undercurrent of primal, instinctual motives that inform human society. Tuazon’s “Forms of Survival” series, for instance, is comprised of five archetypal figures that convey different aspects of the will to live: from physical to cellular survival, from reversals of fate, or from abjectness to superiority, for example. Other works tell of the potency of silence, magic, or mimesis in unlocking keys to the human psyche.

Each object is made complete by its accompanying text: artefacts testifying to the cyclical repetitions of birthing and death, wonder and fear, growth and destruction. As both creators and killers—metaphorically and literally—humans are continuously embedded and invested in the dangerous process of destabilisation. The individual works maybe referring to very specific places or people spanning the entire globe and parallel histories in their diversity. But all these are ultimately allegories of more a universal phenomenon: the continuous and cyclical process of transformation across human natures and states.