Human-animal relationships: At eye level with the animals

There are research fields that are so vast that it is difficult to determine where they begin and where they end. Jessica Ullrich knows what that means: Since October 2026, she has been teaching and researching at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts (HBK) as a professor of art studies with a focus on cultural animal studies. “Some people think it’s a narrow niche,” she says. “But the human-animal relationship permeates all areas of life.”

It is about the critical analysis of the representation of animals in art and literature, film and theater; about ethical, sociological, ecological, historical, ideological relationships between humans and animals. And it's about breaking down the dominance from which humans categorize animals as biological resources and passive possessions and about the question of how the animal culturally moves from being an object of observation to becoming an acting subject.

The view is not limited to works such as Albrecht Dürer's “Hare”, Jack London's “Wolfsblut” or Anton Chekhov's “The Seagull”. It also addresses the reality of zoo captivity, hunting, species extinction and industrial factory farming.

On the website of the publisher in which her journal Animal Studies appears, Ullrich quotes from a lecture by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: "The animal looks at us and we stand naked in front of it. And perhaps thinking begins at exactly this point." Derrida's idea could serve as a motto for Ullrich's new professorship. “Animals look at us as we look at them,” she says, “with their own view of the world.”

The topic of human-animal relationships has long concerned Ullrich, who studied art history, art education and German studies as well as culture and media management. In her doctorate she worked on wax sculptures - including bees. In South Africa she worked in a baboon sanctuary. “There was even a time when I wanted to become a veterinarian,” she says. Today she is doing interdisciplinary pioneering work because her field of research is still young, at least in Germany.

One of Ullrich's tasks at HBK is to set up a new master's degree program. She will bring in external expertise, from biologists to animal ethicists. Cooperation with activist animal rights activists is also conceivable. “I can also imagine incorporating encounters with live animals,” says Ullrich. “For example when visiting farms.” Your own art is also created this way.

At their first seminar, the motivational background of those interested was broad, from veganism to climate protection to criticism of agricultural ancestors. Ullrich relies on “critical students who want to change the world”. Art can “formulate more visionary, radical, utopian relationships to the world than science.”

Anyone who studies with Ullrich has to be prepared for unusual approaches. One of them: the material role of animals in art, like the bees' wax back then. Paints are obtained from the bodies of animals, varnish, brushes. Another: The role of animals as collaborators in contemporary art: This is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys' 1974 campaign “I like America and America likes Me,” for which he spent several days with a wild coyote in a US gallery.

Ullrich, who also works as an exhibition curator, shows: The human-animal relationship, essentially an animal-animal relationship, is fatally lacking in eye level. She wants to change that.