Annie Trevorah / Dolly’s Clinic
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Opening Times
Wed, 4th, Thurs 5th, Fri 6th, / 10 am - 6pm / Sat, 7th 11am - 6pm Tues 10th, Wed 12th, Fri 13th / 10 am - 6pm / Sat, 14th 11am - 6pm Gallery closed / Sun, 8th Nov & Mon, 9th Nov
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Dolly’s Clinic, a new immersive installation and performance by Annie Trevorah, guest curated by Joséphine May Bailey and staged off-site at the Coningsby Gallery in London’s West End.
Trevorah transforms the gallery into a meticulously realised aesthetics clinic for animals. The familiar language and rituals of the contemporary beauty industry are reimagined through a cast of six sculpted animal patients, each with their own signature procedure, consultant’s notes and recovery plan. In this speculative world, animals reclaim authorship over bodies that have long been shaped by human desire, selective breeding and scientific intervention. No longer passive recipients of human manipulation, they become clients, consumers and architects of their own transformation, inviting visitors to question who has the right to shape a body, and for whose benefit.
Taking its name from Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, the exhibition draws on Trevorah’s research into cosmetic surgery, undertaken during a residency at the practice of Dr Arash Khademi (Dr Kay), alongside medieval bestiaries and the surrealist imagination of Leonora Carrington. Like Carrington before her, Trevorah imagines animals not as metaphors but as protagonists: creatures endowed with consciousness, desire and individual identity.
Darkly humorous, provocative and visually seductive, the sculptures are cast in matte aluminium and enriched with seed pods, feathers, glass, leather, resin and textiles. Blurring distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the mythological, Dolly’s Clinic continues Trevorah’s wider enquiry into aesthetics, bodily modification and the politics of appearance.
Beneath its playful and seductive surface, the exhibition raises more fundamental questions about humanity’s relationship with other species. By reversing one of history’s oldest hierarchies, Trevorah challenges the assumption that humans alone possess the authority to determine how other living beings should look, function or evolve. Yet the animals’ newfound autonomy introduces a further paradox: in exercising their freedom, they begin to replicate the very human desires and aesthetic ideals that once dictated their existence.
Dolly’s Clinic offers a provocative reimagining of agency, identity and the boundaries between species, exploring the contradictions between personal freedom, the pleasure of transformation and the external pressures that shape our desires.
For press enquiries, please contact: Meike Brunkhorst, info@factor-m.co.uk. For sales and general enquiries, please contact: Chloi Kountouridou, chloi@mandyzhang.art. For artist tour requests, please contact: info@mandyzhang.art.