Humans are animal symbolicum¹ or animals that live and live symbols. This is Cassier’s statement about the man in the book An Essay on Man, which I borrow and make it the opening sentence for this paper, this statement I put at the beginning as a statement justifying the artists make the work and do this exhibition. Humans in communicating make the symbols to be able to understand each other, the need to communicate with each other happening right then to meet the needs of human beings as social beings. But not so with animals, animals do not produce symbols to communicate, just a sign.

In this exhibition the artist puts himself into an animal spokesman, the artist tries to become a transmitter who can radiate animal issues related to his threatened life, to humans. Humans communicate through an agreed symbol, just like language, images, body gestures, and so on. Communicating means paying attention to the extra-semiotic state, the fact that it can be translated into semiotic terms, does not exclude the continuity of its presence in various background phenomena including the production of the sign.2 However, for communication to occur there must be at least two human beings who agree on the symbol if there are 2 people but no agreement on the same symbol, communication will also be difficult to establish or even not at all.

Artists capturing what animals experience, such as, habitat destruction, decreasing numbers, are a sign of something wrong, which can result in the extinction of certain animal species, which from the artist’s point of view is a problem to be discussed, because if it is unlikely that extinction will really happen and it will certainly be bad because when one element in the ecosystem is gone, of course, it will be embedded in the whole ecosystem.

While not directly appealing to his work to be a solution to the problem, artists here want to create a lighter for this kind of concern to be noticed and noticed, although not directly the question of animals is a problem targeting, but when the problems want to show artists through his work really happened it will also give a bad impact on human life as well of course.

From this idea, the artist then makes highly visual symbols to communicate his or her point of view of the problems that occur with animals. As in his work entitled Anthropocene (age of man) here the artist wishes to convey that through the form of the silhouette of man, that in man there are several symbols that symbolize the strength and human nature, cleverness and selfishness make humans quickly develop and dominate on earth, the most perfect species ever on earth. Because the clause of perfection is what makes humans often forget about the surrounding, the symbols that included artists in this work is unused human gear and the material is the material jeans, artists use symbols of materials used jeans as a symbolic form of human clever to create one but often excavate to compensate for the waste generated from what he created, and as a result it will become a new problem, and can threaten the ecosystem of other living things.

In other works artists use much more than one medium to construct a work, as in the work of Antagonists, the artist tries to explain his concept through two parallel panel drawings. In this work the artist talks about the animal lovers themselves, animal lovers are people who care about the animal’s life, in this perspective animal lovers are divided into two groups who have their own views on how to treat the animal, which has and does not have . The group has symbolized by the writer in the form of a fist, feels whole and assumes the animal is his own, making the animal unable to behave as he wishes. This limitation of movement makes the animal slowly lose its original or wild behavior.

Broadly speaking, the artist’s work deals with issues related to the animal world, the artist visualizes it with a brightly colored image and combines it with symbols as an assertion of the artist’s statement about how he wins his appreciator to behave. If only seen from how the artist visualize the work maybe just a piece that we can capture from the works on display, but the interesting thing is the artist makes the bridge by using the symbol clearly and generally blessed in his work so that his work can be read, and what he wants he is related to the animal world can be well conveyed.

¹ Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, (Yale University Press, 1944), page. 15

‘Humans are animal symbolicum, or animals that live and live the symbol’

² Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, (Indiana University Press, 1976), page. 236-237

• Written as a curatorial introduction to the exhibition entitled Look of Silent – solo exhibition by Alif Mustafa