The list of fantastic, mythical animals compiled by Carl Linnaeus in his seminal 18th century work Systema Naturae could well be the seed of Niles Atallah’s Animalia Paradoxa – an eccentric tale set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows a strange creature struggling to survive. Dressed in rags and a gas mask, moving like an alien dancer, Animalia roams through an abandoned building – crawling and stretching across concrete, plastic, waste. She laboriously carries and fills up an array of empty bottles to enjoy a modest bath. The camera eye lingers on her with compassion and explores the architectures of trash at an agonising pace. We know in our hearts that Animalia is a human-amphibian longing for the sea…

After Lucía (2010) and Rey (Tiger Special Jury Award, 2017), Atallah returns to Rotterdam with a poignant fable that mixes the observational with the surreal. Amid Animalia’s daily ritual, vivid black-and-white images of seascapes and fish twinkle on the screen, as if coming from the films of Jean Painlevé or Jean Epstein… In Animalia Paradoxa the body becomes a site of experimentation: a meeting point for the avant-garde, animation and performance art.

– Cristina Álvarez López