A 26-story constructing, wider than it’s tall, is house to tens of hundreds of pigs. None of them has ever touched actual grass or felt the solar on their pores and skin. They are going to solely be known as “pigs” for a short while; after passing by way of every of the 26 tales—the insemination degree, the fattening degree, and so forth—they’ll turn into “pork.” A video by Ang Siew Ching exhibits this constructing’s foreboding enormity, its floor space nearing that of the one-story village at its toes, whose residents are gifted pork rations for placing up with the terrible scent. Footage shot inside exhibits pink pigs and panda pigs craving to attach, however they will’t fairly attain one another by way of their stainless-steel enclosures. With out area or sociality, all they do is eat and sleep.
Ching’s video exhibits us the type of setting the place most meat comes from—a sight usually left unseen. The work is about in China, however exhibits a skyscraper manufacturing unit farm mannequin created in Nineteenth-century Cincinnati—a metropolis then often known as Porkopolis. Titled Excessive-Rise Pigs (2025), it is without doubt one of the most pointed and heart-wrenching works in “Why Have a look at Animals: A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” on view on the Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork in Athens by way of February 15. Excessive-Rise Pigs is displayed within the museum’s basement, with this primary flooring narrating every kind of horrors earlier than sending viewers up escalators to contemplate how issues is likely to be in any other case.
Additionally within the basement is a map of the world, drawn in charcoal on a wall by the artist duo Artwork Orienté Objet, that names endangered species in endangered languages. An eraser on a robotic arm is slowly wiping the drawing away all through the exhibition’s run—a reminder that each one species, human and in any other case, are threatened by the relentless extractions of capitalism and colonialism. Close by, a print by Sue Coe on the exhibition’s entrance provocatively hyperlinks human to animal struggling with textual content studying: AUSCHWITZ BEGINS WEHNVER SOMEONE LOOKS AT A SLAUGHTERHOUSE AND THINKS…
Paris Petridis: Bethlehem, 2012.
Courtesy the artist
“Why Have a look at Animals” is the primary exhibition of its variety and scale to enlist artwork to confront animal liberation—a quite unpopular subject, as consciousness of all of it however calls for the sacrifice of private consolation. What different logical or moral response may there be to the horrors of manufacturing unit farming, or to the truth that the meat business is liable for 14.5 p.c of greenhouse gasoline emissions?
The curator, Katerina Gregos, described pitching the exhibition for 10 years with little curiosity, then curating it now “with a vengeance.” It spans the museum’s seven flooring and is the establishment’s largest present up to now. The silence-breaking is highly effective—proof that many extra folks care about animals than I had realized beforehand, and proof that there simply is likely to be a strong coalition. It contains over 60 artists, and virtually none are those I might have anticipated.
I used to be delighted to be taught that artists I’d been following for years cared for animals, too. One is Igor Grubić, a Croatian artist who’s displaying a movie of a canine sniffing round a disused Italian slaughterhouse that, in actual life, was being transformed right into a manufacturing unit for plant-based meat alternate options—proof that client calls for can in truth create change. You may see the canine, named Björk, smelling pigs from the previous, and also you’re invited to replicate on which species turn into pets and which turn into merchandise.
Nonetheless from Igor Grubić’s Ingresso Animali Vivi, 2023.
Courtesy the artist
“Why Have a look at Animals” is titled after a John Berger essay of the identical title, wherein the late critic argues that estrangement from dwelling animals, in fashionable instances and concrete locales, has stripped us of our empathy for them. This implies artists have a novel duty to carry us face-to-face with animals’ sentience, their personalities, their cuteness, and their charms. In fact, animals will not be sufficient: it issues what we see and the way we see it. Janis Rafa alludes to this in a three-channel video about on a regular basis equine abuse, displaying horses chained to treadmills alongside numerous S&M-looking gadgets for taming and controlling them. As a wall label notes, “man’s wrongful means of referring to the animal” derives from humanity’s “repressed wildness.” Eadweard Muybridge’s ghost looms massive: his first-ever shifting picture, in spite of everything, was of a trotting horse, although its intent and impact had been hardly animal liberation.
In the meantime, Tiziana Pers takes Berger’s name to its logical conclusion. Farms carry her livestock too sick or disabled to turn into meat, and she or he items them hand-drawn portraits of every animal (whom she additionally names) in return. As well as, Pers created a ceramic dinnerware sequence, with one saucer studying THE AGE OF REMEDY IS NOW/ REVOLUTION IS ON YOUR PLATE; any collector of the ceramics should signal a contract agreeing to not eat meat on them.
A recurring theme all through the present is interspecies language boundaries. A bit on sound gestures to this with uncommon recordings of laughing rats and of animal sounds at frequencies inaudible to people—a reminder to acknowledge the boundaries of communication between people and different animals, lest we impose our values on them. Emma Talbot’s silk work, in the meantime, make the unlucky mistake of placing phrases in animals’ mouths. A speech bubble above a thin canine painted on an enormous silk curtain reads HUMANS NORMALISE ENTRAPMENT AND OWNERSHIP, LANGUAGES WE DON’T SHARE. Grubić splits the distinction, utilizing pointed but open-ended language in billboards round Athens that ask questions: DO ANIMALS DREAM OF FREEDOM? DO ANIMALS KNOW THEY ARE PRODCUTS?
Lin Might Saeed: Elephant Reduction (V04), 2021.
Courtesy Lin Might Saeed Property and Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt. Picture Wolfgang Günzel.
The present is a trove of treasures that can rip your coronary heart out, in case you have one. However it shines extra by the use of pathos than logos. Disappointingly, practically all of the works evince an both childlike or science-exhibit-esque aesthetic, and although the present clearly privileges content material over type, the transfer dangers reinforcing preconceived concepts about animal lovers as nerdy or naïve. The titular framework of “animal rights” leaves one thing to be desired, too: I choose the time period “animal liberation.” Higher than granting animals permission, let’s overthrow humanity’s tyrannical regime. Lin Might Saeed’s The Liberation of Animals from their Cages II (2007), displaying masked activists flinging open gates and setting animals free, is infinitely extra inspiring than Wesley Meuris’s plans for “extra humane” enclosures for hippos and sugar gliders.
And the place the curatorial textual content describes the higher flooring as utopic and imaginative, I discovered the works there extra rooted in historical past than fantasy—visions which might be attainable, and a few which have already been attained. Close to the tip of the present are works by Saeed, an artist who advocated for animals tirelessly till her premature dying, in 2023, at age 50. (This present and a concurrent animal-art exhibition at SALT in Istanbul each describe themselves as testaments to her galvanizing legacy.) Saeed was at all times seeking to historical past, faith, and fables to point out us that human-animal relations have been completely different and so may be completely different once more: most cultures all through human historical past had moral concepts about consuming animals till lately. As you exit the present, a neon check in Greek by Tiziana Pers asks us, like Saeed, to look to historical past for the longer term, imploring guests as they go about their lives: DO NOT FORGET THE WORLD TO COME.