Join us in the STUDIO on Monday March 25th from 5-6PM for CAPTURED SHOW:  a screening and conversation between Inbar Hagai and Marianne Hoffmeister Castro

Captured Show (working title) is an in-progress documentary project centered around the customs of rabbit shows in the US. Hagai has been following this subculture of competitive rabbit breeding for the past year, documenting the meticulous practices and skills of breeding and judging rabbits, as well as the culture of the rabbit showrooms and the dynamics of the breeders’ community. This film developed out of the research and production process for Hagai’s thesis exhibition, The Decoys (2024), which is currently on view as part of Second Degree Vision, the School of Art MFA exhibition at the Miller ICA.

This event will feature excerpts from the film in the making, accompanied by a conversation between Inbar Hagai and Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (joining us remotely via Zoom), moderated by Associate Professor Angela Washko. During the conversation, we’ll delve into the elusive motivations behind rabbit breeding and showing, exploring the human inclination to categorize and strive for perfection. We’ll also examine how this seemingly niche subject connects to broader concepts of domestication and breeding practices of nonhuman animals.

Bios

Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (b. 1989) is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist. Her work proposes an examination of the representation of nature and nonhuman animals in the contemporary Western world. Working with drawing, installation, film, experimental writing and editorial practices, she investigates inherited narratives of instrumentalization, objectification, and dominant modes of capture and othering of the animal. Through her research and artistic practice, she explores the possibilities of non-anthropocentric storytelling strategies to reimagine new modes of relation, modes of seeing, and iconographies of empathy with nonhuman domains in times of existential and ecological crisis.

Inbar Hagai (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and filmmaker whose work spans video, virtual reality, sculpture, and experimental documentary filmmaking. Her long-term projects often meander through a series of narrative rabbit holes, blurring the boundaries between documentation and fantasy, staged and happenstance. This hybrid ethos is used to transgressively and humorously reflect on cultural conventions (and their subsequent taboos) around interspecies cohabitation and domination within human-machine-animal relationships, libidinal desires, spatial actuality, and the breeding and domestication of non-human animals.