Athens Exhibition says revolution can begin on your plate

A 26-story building is wider than a tall building and is home to thousands of pigs. None of them touched the real grass or felt the sunshine on their skin. They will only be called “pigs” for a short period of time. After each of the 26 stories (insemination level, fattening level, etc.), they will become “pork”. Ang Siew Ching’s video shows the huge and enormous nature of the building, with its surface area close to the village of a floor below its feet, whose residents are gifted pork rations to open up the smell of fear. The footage shot inside shows the pink pig and panda pig eager to connect, but they can’t reach each other completely through the stainless steel shell. There is no space or sociality, all they do is eat and sleep.

Ching’s video shows us the settings where most meat comes from – often invisible sights. The work was set in China, but shows a farm model for a skyscraper factory that was created in the 19th century Cincinnati, a city known as Porkopolis. Title High-rise pig (2025), from February 15 to February 15, in the Athens National Museum of Contemporary Art, it is one of the sharpest and painful works of “Why to see animals: a case of the right to live in non-humans”. High-rise pig Displayed in the basement of the museum, the first floor describes various horrors, and then the audience is sent to take the escalator to think about the situation.

There is also a world map in the basement, which is painted on the wall by artist duo duo, name endangered species in endangered language. The eraser on the robot’s arm is slowly wiping through the entire exhibition’s run, a reminder that all species, humans and others are threatened by the ruthless extraction of capitalism and colonialism. Nearby, Sue Coe’s prints on the entrance to the exhibition link humans with painful animals to text reading: The Auschwitz concentration camp began, and someone looked at the slaughterhouse and thought…

“Why See Animals” is the first exhibition to attract art to face animal liberation, an unpopular topic because it all requires sacrifice of personal comfort. What other logical or ethical responses might be there for the horror of factory agriculture, or the fact that the meat industry is responsible for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions?

Curator Katerina Gregos described the exhibition’s 10 years, with little interest, and then curated it as “revenge.” It covers the seven-story building of the museum and is the institution’s largest program to date. The destruction of silence is powerful – people in the past have more animals than I had ever realized before and proved that there might be a strong alliance. It includes over 60 artists, with almost no artists I expected.

I’m happy to learn that I’m also focusing on artists who have cared for animals for years. One is Croatian artist Igor Grubić, who is showing a dog movie sniffing around an abandoned Italian slaughterhouse that, in real life, is transforming into a factory for plant-based meat alternatives, and consumer demand can actually change. You can see the dog named Björk, smelling the pigs of the past and inviting you to reflect on which species become pets and which species become products.

“Why look at animals” is named by John Berger, in which the late critics argue that in modern and urban areas, the alienation of living animals makes us sympathetic to them. This means that artists have a unique responsibility to face the perception of animals, their personality, cuteness and charm. Of course, seeing animals is not enough: what we see and how we view it is important. Janis Rafa hints at this in a three-channel video, showing the links of horses to horses on the treadmill, as well as countless S&M-looking devices to tame and control them. As the wall label points out, the “wrong ways of humans and animals” stem from the “repressive wildness” of humans. The ghost of Eadwear Muybridge is vaguely visible: after all, his first movement is like a trotting horse, although its intentions and effects are hardly animal liberation.

Meanwhile, Tiziana Pers draws Berger’s appeal to a reasonable conclusion. The farm made her livestock sick or disabled and unable to become meat, and she gave them a hand-painted portrait of each of them (she also named it). Additionally, PERS has created a ceramic tableware series with a plate reading The age of healing is now/revolution on your plate; Any collector of ceramics must sign a contract and agree not to eat meat on it.

The recurring theme throughout the show is interspecies language barrier. The part about this sound gesture is rarely recorded with the frequency of laughter and part of animal voices that humans cannot hear, a reminder of the limitations of communication between humans and other animals so that we do not impose our values ​​on them. Meanwhile, Emma Talbot’s silk painting made an unfortunate mistake of putting words in the mouth of an animal. Speech bubble above a skinny dog ​​reads on huge silk curtains Humans standardize inclusions and ownership, a language we do not share. Grubić breaks down the differences using sharp and open language in billboards around Athens: Ask questions: Do animals dream of freedom? Do animals know that they cause it?

The show is a lot of treasures that can tear your heart open if you have one. But it shines through sadness rather than logos. Disappointingly, almost all of the works show a childlike or scientific stylistic aesthetic, and while the show clearly puts content privileges, the move could make preconceived ideas about animal lovers nerds or naive. The nominal framework of “animal rights” also has something that needs: I prefer the term “animal liberation”. Better than granting animal permission, let us overthrow the tyrannical regime of humanity. Lin May Saeed Free animals from the cage (2007), the display of masked radicals escaped the door of release and let go of animals, which was more inspiring than Wesley Meuris’ plan to plan the “more humane” shell of hippos and sugar gliders.

In a place where the curatorial text describes the high level as unified and imaginative, I find that the work there is rooted in history rather than fantasy-the things that can be realized, and that some have been obtained. The show ended with the work of Saeed, an artist who relentlessly advocated animals until 2023, in 2023, the year 50 (this exhibition and the exhibition of animal arts in Istanbul with salt) both describe themselves as proof of freedom. Until recently, history had a moral concept of eating animals. When you exit the show, Tiziana Pers’ neon sign in Greek asks us to look for future history like Saeed, begging visitors to plead in life: Don’t forget that the world is coming.