Zoo view …
This is less a picture of an animal than how we look at animals, or rather a manmade space that tries – and pathetically fails – to create a particular way of looking at an animal.
Hay wane …
The mural of the African plain is clearly not there for the poor giraffe who, incapable of responding to a 2D representation, munches from a manger incongruously jutting from the branches of a painted tree.
Caged birds …
This 1997 work is one in a series focused on European zoos, taken by the German photographer Candida Höfer in the 1990s. The spaces include the famed penguin pool at London zoo and brutalist concrete elephant enclosures in Germany.
People are strange …
Höfer’s objective approach brings out just how odd these environments are: ill-suited to the animals but jarring too for the human audiences they’re designed for.
Museums without walls …
Typically focusing on cultural centres, including museums and libraries, her work emphasises how constructed, and ultimately precarious, our systems of knowledge are.
Included in Animals & Us, Turner Contemporary, Margate, to 30 September
