A 26-story building, wider than it is tall, is home to tens of thousands of pigs. None of them has ever touched real grass or felt the sun on their skin. They will only be called “pigs” for a short time; after passing through each of the 26 stories—the insemination level, the fattening level, and so on—they will become “pork.” A video by Ang Siew Ching shows this building’s foreboding enormity, its surface area nearing that of the one-story village at its feet, whose residents are gifted pork rations for putting up with the awful smell. Footage shot inside shows pink pigs and panda pigs yearning to connect, but they can’t quite reach each other through their stainless-steel enclosures. Without space or sociality, all they do is eat and sleep.
Ching’s video shows us the kind of setting where most meat comes from—a sight generally left unseen. The work is set in China, but shows a skyscraper factory farm model created in 19th-century Cincinnati—a city then known as Porkopolis. Titled High-Rise Pigs (2025), it is one of the most pointed and heart-wrenching works in “Why Look at Animals: A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” on view at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens through February 15. High-Rise Pigs is displayed in the museum’s basement, with this first floor narrating all kinds of horrors before sending viewers up escalators to consider how things might be otherwise.
Also in the basement is a map of the world, drawn in charcoal on a wall by the artist duo Art Orienté Objet, that names endangered species in endangered languages. An eraser on a robotic arm is slowly wiping the drawing away throughout the exhibition’s run—a reminder that all species, human and otherwise, are threatened by the relentless extractions of capitalism and colonialism. Nearby, a print by Sue Coe at the exhibition’s entrance provocatively links human to animal suffering with text reading: AUSCHWITZ BEGINS WEHNVER SOMEONE LOOKS AT A SLAUGHTERHOUSE AND THINKS…
“Why Look at Animals” is the first exhibition of its kind and scale to enlist art to confront animal liberation—a rather unpopular topic, as awareness of it all but demands the sacrifice of personal comfort. What other logical or ethical response could there be to the horrors of factory farming, or to the fact that the meat industry is responsible for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions?
The curator, Katerina Gregos, described pitching the exhibition for 10 years with little interest, then curating it now “with a vengeance.” It spans the museum’s seven floors and is the institution’s biggest show to date. The silence-breaking is powerful—evidence that many more people care about animals than I had realized previously, and proof that there just might be a powerful coalition. It includes over 60 artists, and almost none are the ones I would have expected.
I was delighted to learn that artists I’d been following for years cared for animals, too. One is Igor Grubić, a Croatian artist who’s showing a film of a dog sniffing around a disused Italian slaughterhouse that, in real life, was being converted into a factory for plant-based meat alternatives—proof that consumer demands can in fact create change. You can see the dog, named Björk, smelling pigs from the past, and you’re invited to reflect on which species become pets and which become products.
“Why Look at Animals” is titled after a John Berger essay of the same name, in which the late critic argues that estrangement from living animals, in modern times and urban locales, has stripped us of our empathy for them. This means artists have a unique responsibility to bring us face-to-face with animals’ sentience, their personalities, their cuteness, and their charms. Of course, looking at animals is not enough: it matters what we see and how we see it. Janis Rafa alludes to this in a three-channel video about everyday equine abuse, showing horses chained to treadmills alongside countless S&M-looking devices for taming and controlling them. As a wall label notes, “man’s wrongful way of relating to the animal” derives from humanity’s “repressed wildness.” Eadweard Muybridge’s ghost looms large: his first-ever moving image, after all, was of a trotting horse, though its intent and effect were hardly animal liberation.
Meanwhile, Tiziana Pers takes Berger’s call to its logical conclusion. Farms bring her livestock too ill or disabled to become meat, and she gifts them hand-drawn portraits of each animal (whom she also names) in return. In addition, Pers created a ceramic dinnerware series, with one saucer reading THE AGE OF REMEDY IS NOW/ REVOLUTION IS ON YOUR PLATE; any collector of the ceramics must sign a contract agreeing not to eat meat on them.
A recurring theme throughout the show is interspecies language barriers. A section on sound gestures to this with rare recordings of laughing rats and of animal sounds at frequencies inaudible to humans—a reminder to acknowledge the limits of communication between humans and other animals, lest we impose our values on them. Emma Talbot’s silk paintings, meanwhile, make the unfortunate mistake of putting words in animals’ mouths. A speech bubble above a skinny dog painted on a giant silk curtain reads HUMANS NORMALISE ENTRAPMENT AND OWNERSHIP, LANGUAGES WE DON’T SHARE. Grubić splits the difference, using pointed yet open-ended language in billboards around Athens that ask questions: DO ANIMALS DREAM OF FREEDOM? DO ANIMALS KNOW THEY ARE PRODCUTS?
The show is a trove of treasures that will rip your heart out, if you have one. But it shines more by way of pathos than logos. Disappointingly, nearly all the works evince an either childlike or science-exhibit-esque aesthetic, and though the show clearly privileges content over form, the move risks reinforcing preconceived ideas about animal lovers as nerdy or naïve. The titular framework of “animal rights” leaves something to be desired, too: I prefer the term “animal liberation.” Better than granting animals permission, let’s overthrow humanity’s tyrannical regime. Lin May Saeed’s The Liberation of Animals from their Cages II (2007), showing masked activists flinging open gates and setting animals free, is infinitely more inspiring than Wesley Meuris’s plans for “more humane” enclosures for hippos and sugar gliders.
And where the curatorial text describes the upper floors as utopic and imaginative, I found the works there more rooted in history than fantasy—visions that are attainable, and some that have already been attained. Near the end of the show are works by Saeed, an artist who advocated for animals tirelessly until her untimely death, in 2023, at age 50. (This show and a concurrent animal-art exhibition at SALT in Istanbul both describe themselves as testaments to her galvanizing legacy.) Saeed was always looking to history, religion, and fables to show us that human-animal relations have been different and so can be different again: most cultures throughout human history had ethical ideas about eating animals until recently. As you exit the show, a neon sign in Greek by Tiziana Pers asks us, like Saeed, to look to history for the future, imploring visitors as they go about their lives: DO NOT FORGET THE WORLD TO COME.
