Flogging a dead kitten

Nathalia Edenmont made a huge mass media breakthrough last year when Swedish tabloids made headlines like “The animals are being killed to become art!” I never did understand why Edenmont’s art is so controversial. Depicting dead animals is hardly a very new idea. Not even killing them yourself is new. Part of it might be that the photos are hauntingly beautiful, but Andres Serrano already made real human corpses – even murder victims! – look poetic, like this.

A short background: Edenmont kills cute animals, like kittens or bunnies or mice. She then combines the chopped up body parts with objects, or flowers, or something similar, and take photographs of them. They looks like old still life paintings at first glance.

Her pictures are very suggestive when seen in full format. It’s hard to do them real justice on a computer screen. They invoke strange – some might say surreal – feelings. But beyond that… nothing. Her work is empty of any real meaning except for the usual I-want-to-examine-the-double-standards-of-society-eating-steak-but-being-horrified-by-dead-kittens-rant.

It annoys me. She is obviously a very talented photographer, and her work is extremely charismatic, and that’s all she has to say? That modern society has double standards for animal rights? Most of us figured that out in our teens, and dealt with it or became vegans… besides perhaps Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, but I digress…

Nathalia Edenmont is on the road to fame and international recognition. Her dead animals have created controversy wherever they’ve been shown. I just hope that she has something more to say, or she will soon become very boring.