Can guilt serve as a compelling incentive for mounting an exhibition? For some of the artists exhibiting in Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), it nurtured the work. Janis Rafa’s film triptych The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth (2023) evokes the methods used to train racehorses with the help of sophisticated yet cruel equipment used to make them run blindly in circles. The artist grew up with horses, enjoyed riding them as a teenager, and took part in competitions, but reflects that the relationship between human and animal is often non-consensual, which eventually made her quit all equestrian activities. Guilt translated into taking responsibility and making the way we treat animals the focus of her research and art work.
Janis Rafa, The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, still from 3 channel video projection, 2023
Animals play a role in most human lives from early on, but in what way exactly? Most often they serve. As means of transportation, as amusement, as a toy or a curiosum, as protection, as horsepower, or simply as food on the plate. Why Look at Animals brings together the work of over sixty artists offering diverse ways of looking at animals and reflecting on the human–animal relationship. In a film by Tiziana Pers, Saut dans le vide (2016), a truck transports pigs, one of them struggling to escape, succeeding with a courageous yet painful jump. In a filmed diptych by Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Today I Am, Tomorrow I’m Not (2023), a stray dog with three legs limps through an run-down industrial area. The film gets close to the perspective of dogs, the camera held low, showing the waste land they live in. They have a lonely if not shitty life; nobody seems to care. But then some people do, the film zooms in on a team of people who drive around and look for animals who need help, bringing them to the vet.
Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Today I Am, Tomorrow I am not, still from 2 channel video, 2023
As the base for the exhibition, EMST Director Katerina Gregos chose John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” (which gave the show its title)in which the British author zoomed in on the way we have seen animals through different eras and on the power relationships that are implicit in, for instance, a visit to the zoo, where animals are deprived of all natural behavior and habits. His 1980 essay shakes up the comfort of commonly accepted viewpoints, from the plush toy pets children are surrounded with, to weekly zoo visits. Berger’s tone can be somewhat condescending, but as a collection of viewpoints, his essay invites a deeper consideration of how modernity and capitalism have shaped our relationship with animals.
Wesley Meuris, Enclosure for Animal (zoology), 2006-2021
Gregos has translated the material into a diverse exhibition, ranging from activist and documentarial to more philosophical or lyrical approaches. A level of abstraction can be found in Wesley Meuris’s Enclosure for Animal (zoology) (2006–21). An empty stage, a tiled mosaic floor and walls, serves as a model for animals to be caged. The presence of the animals is anticipated in the way the room is organized, where they should eat or move, but it is their absence that makes the work eerie and fascinating, putting instead the human design and intentions on display. In other cases, a poetic approach saves the exhibition from being an illustration of discussion points. The embroidered works by Britta Marakatt-Labba are based on environmental and other daily issues from Sámi life in the north of Sweden, but they attain their impact mainly through the way the artist masters embroidery in a painting-like style. Hers offers a modest yet vivid and fragile perspective.
Britta Marakatt-Labba, Between Two Worlds, Embroidery and aplique on linen, 2018-19
For Singapore-born, Helsinki-based Ang Siew Ching, it was not guilt that made her want to work on the film High-Rise Pigs (2025), about the way pigs are processed in a Chinese factory, but rather a moment of alienation when she touched a pig for the first time and could only think “bacon.” She reflects, “It was not about coming to an ethical or political position but exploring the strangeness borne out of my encounter with the pig.” She found out that knowing more about the animal’s life comes with a level of being uncomfortable. The film shows, through circling around the factory building, and presenting models of the procedures inside, exactly where we are not supposed to look, as the animals are being prepared for slaughter in an industry that is more efficient than caring. The pigs are carefully kept out of view, behind the façade of a twenty-six-story building that could just as well have been a parking lot. It is the biggest pork-producing factory situated in a rural town in China’s Hubei province, set up to meet the enormous demand for pork.
Ang Siew Ching, High Rise Pigs, still from video, 2025
Some works play directly upon the emotions, exposing the cruelty of humans, such as the portrait Tiziana Pers made of a monkey who, for scientific research, was kept awake on purpose. The painting evokes the sleep-deprived monkey as a ghost. People are pigs, you would almost say, if that were not another example of disrespecting animals.
Even though many works in the exhibition make the mood melancholic, leaning heavily on dark narratives, other contributions lift the spirits, such as Nabil Boutros’s series of sixty-five photos Celebrities / Ovine Condition (2014), presented as a frieze around the room. They are crystal clear portraits of sheep as individuals, photographed in the same way we like to take portraits of people. The artist brings us close to identification with the animals, as we read their different characters, one earnest, another proud, a third one shy. Or maybe we just project these human features on them. In any case, the effect here is that they, the animals, are one of us, rather than the other.
Even though Gregos likes to make her shows pointed with a political narrative (as the subtitle makes clear), it does not feel like guilt or accusation was her only motif or message. Despite its biennale-like size, the exhibition feels like one of the more personal shows she has curated, coming from a true connection with the subject matter, the result of growing up close to animals. The specific Greek situation, where animals are present in many rural communities but also suffer from humans’ old-fashioned authoritarian viewpoints, may have served as the dramatic starting point for an issue that, in the end, is relevant to most societies and individuals.
Who does not have a relationship with animals, you might ask walking through the extensive show, knowing that the pleasures of eating meat can be guilty. It made me think about the earliest known paintings in caves, and in that sense, about the cradle of art. The first thing people wanted to paint were animals. They were considered worth depicting, the result of fascination, respect, fear, or adoration. They have been, through the centuries and up to the present day, a mirror of human life. But can we also see them as they are?
This text was first published in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec/Jan 2025-26. The exhibition is on view from 16 May 2025 till 15 April 2026 at EMST, Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Image header: Nabil Boutros, Celebrities, Ovine Condition, print, 2014