A 26-story constructing, wider than it’s tall, is house to tens of 1000’s 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 are going to turn out to be “pork.” A video by Ang Siew Ching reveals this constructing’s foreboding enormity, its floor space nearing that of the one-story village at its ft, whose residents are gifted pork rations for placing up with the terrible odor. Footage shot inside reveals 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 reveals us the form of setting the place most meat comes from—a sight usually left unseen. The work is ready in China, however reveals a skyscraper manufacturing facility farm mannequin created in Nineteenth-century Cincinnati—a metropolis then referred to as Porkopolis. Titled Excessive-Rise Pigs (2025), it is among the most pointed and heart-wrenching works in “Why Take a look at Animals: A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” on view on the Nationwide Museum of Modern Artwork in Athens by way of February 15. Excessive-Rise Pigs is displayed within the museum’s basement, with this primary ground 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 every 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 Take a look at Animals” is the primary exhibition of its type and scale to enlist artwork to confront animal liberation—a reasonably unpopular subject, as consciousness of all of it however calls for the sacrifice of non-public consolation. What different logical or moral response may there be to the horrors of manufacturing facility farming, or to the truth that the meat trade is accountable for 14.5 % of greenhouse fuel 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 so far. The silence-breaking is highly effective—proof that many extra individuals care about animals than I had realized beforehand, and proof that there simply is likely to be a robust coalition. It consists of over 60 artists, and nearly 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 exhibiting a movie of a canine sniffing round a disused Italian slaughterhouse that, in actual life, was being transformed right into a manufacturing facility for plant-based meat alternate options—proof that shopper calls for can in truth create change. You’ll be able to see the canine, named Björk, smelling pigs from the previous, and also you’re invited to replicate on which species turn out to be pets and which turn out to be merchandise.
Nonetheless from Igor Grubić’s Ingresso Animali Vivi, 2023.
Courtesy the artist
“Why Take a look at Animals” is titled after a John Berger essay of the identical title, by which the late critic argues that estrangement from dwelling animals, in trendy occasions and concrete locales, has stripped us of our empathy for them. This implies artists have a singular duty to carry us face-to-face with animals’ sentience, their personalities, their cuteness, and their charms. After all, taking a look at 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, exhibiting horses chained to treadmills alongside numerous S&M-looking gadgets for taming and controlling them. As a wall label notes, “man’s wrongful approach of referring to the animal” derives from humanity’s “repressed wildness.” Eadweard Muybridge’s ghost looms giant: his first-ever shifting picture, in any case, was of a trotting horse, although its intent and impact have been hardly animal liberation.
In the meantime, Tiziana Pers takes Berger’s name to its logical conclusion. Farms carry her livestock too in poor health or disabled to turn out to be meat, and he or she 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 obstacles. 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 bounds 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 May Saeed: Elephant Reduction (V04), 2021.
Courtesy Lin Might Saeed Property and Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt. Photograph Wolfgang Günzel.
The present is a trove of treasures that can rip your coronary heart out, if in case you have one. But it surely shines extra by the use of pathos than logos. Disappointingly, almost 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 want 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), exhibiting 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 demise, 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 totally different and so may be totally different once more: most cultures all through human historical past had moral concepts about consuming animals till just lately. As you exit the present, a neon sign up 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.