Animal Spirits

The economic crisis faced by the world today is not only extensive and multifaceted, but its implications for our future are profound. "Animal Spirits," the collection of drawings from the Dakis Joannou Drawing Collection presented in the Hydra Slaughterhouse, is intended to invoke comment and trigger reflection on our current global dilemma. The title of the exhibition references a concept coined by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes argues that animal spirits — emotional factors that cannot be modeled or quantified, and are thus often played down by economists — are in fact very important to the understanding of economic dynamics.
The drawings at the Slaughterhouse on Hydra are in dialogue with each other and also with the architecture that houses them, its atmosphere, and traces of all past narratives. Drawing on animal spirits, the exhibition reflects the leaps of faith, politics of trust, social bestiaries, blind confidence, spreading fear, and distorted meaning of positivism emerging in our world today all the while provoking acknowledgment of the looming international crisis.