15 May 2025
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Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives centres on animal rights and animal well-being, highlighting the urgent need to recognise and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that exploits, oppresses and brutalises them. The exhibition is inspired by John Berger’s seminal essay of the same name, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), which explores the changing relationship between humans and animals, particularly in the context of modernity.The essay reflects on how animals, once deeply integrated into human life, have become increasingly distanced, objectified and commodified.
Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives aims to engender a discussion around the ethics and politics of how we treat animals. By exposing the exploitative, violent mechanisms behind systemic animal abuse, it renders what is shamefully invisible visible. The exhibition and its public programme hope to raise awareness of the conditions of non-human animal life today, from the home, the street and the factory to their threatened natural habitats.
Why Look at Animals? invites us to consider the non-human animal not as “Other”, but as a being with a “voice” and intrinsic value of its own, capable of artfulness, play, socialisation and transformation, pleasure, inventiveness, pain and grief.