Why Look at Animals?

After nearly a year of exhibitions, public programme, screenings, and artistic interventions, EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, concludes its exhibition cycle, Why Look at Animals?, an ambitious museum-wide programme dedicated to reconsidering the place of non-human lives within contemporary ethical, ecological, and political thought.

To mark its culmination, EMST Athens will host a symposium and launch a publication – events that collectively extend the exhibition’s central proposition: that the question of animals is inseparable from the question of how we imagine justice in a more-than-human world.

At the heart of the year-long programme was Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives curated by Katerina Gregos. Spanning all seven levels of the museum and featuring work by more than 60 international artists, the group exhibition has been among the most expansive artistic explorations to date of humanity’s fraught relationship with animals from a political and ethical point of view.

Inspired by John Berger’s seminal essay of the same title, it repudiates traditional narratives that depict animals as commodities or symbolic and aesthetic objects to consider them as subjects, agents, co-inhabitants, and political, sentient subjects whose lives are deeply entangled with the systems – industrial, colonial, technological, and economic – that structure human society.



In 2025, Gregos was awarded the Nancy Regan Arts Prize by the Culture & Animals Foundation, marking the first time the honour was given to a curator and recognising her sustained engagement with the ethics and politics of human–animal relations. The award acknowledged the groundbreaking scope and urgency of Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives.

The exhibition emerged from an urgent ethical premise: the widespread marginalisation of animals in human cultures is not simply a problem of representation and (in)visibility but of systemic injustice and institutionalised cruelty. Industrial farming, habitat destruction, scientific experimentation, warfare, and extractive economic models continue to shape the conditions under which non-human life is rendered invisible, exploitable, or disposable. At the same time, developments in animal studies, ethology, and philosophy increasingly challenge the anthropocentric hierarchies that have historically justified these practices.

The artists in the exhibition have engaged with these questions through diverse methodologies, ranging from documentary research, postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives and speculative fiction, to activist practice, sound environments, and poetic reflection. Their work has examined themes such as speciesism, animal intelligence, ecological interdependence, and the political frameworks (or lack thereof) that regulate human–animal relations. In doing so, they have revealed how the fate of animals is inextricably linked to broader questions of environmental justice, climate crisis, and the future of planetary coexistence.

From its inception, Why Look at Animals? was conceived as a wider discursive platform extending across the museum’s programme through solo exhibitions, installations, screenings, publications, and public events. Together, these initiatives have sought to open a space for interdisciplinary dialogue between art, philosophy, law, ecology, and activism, fields increasingly united by the recognition that the rights of non-human beings constitute one of the most marginalised yet pressing ethical frontiers of the twenty-first century.

The finissage symposium, titled [Against] Animal Capitalism and curated by artist Terike Haapoja, expands this conversation into the realms of governance, visibility, and political resistance. Bringing together scholars, artists, activists, and legal thinkers, the two-day gathering addresses how contemporary economic systems structure the exploitation of animals while exploring emerging frameworks of interspecies justice and legal recognition.

The programme includes lectures, discussions, and moving-image contributions by participants including Rimona Afana, Charlotte Blattner, David Brooks, Pablo B. Castello, Katerina Gregos, Gizem Haspolat, Dominique Knowles, Syl Ko, Jo-Anne Mcarthur, Anastasia Miliou, Tiziana Pers, Shay Salehi, Dimitris Soumalevris, Federica Timeto, Richard Twine, and Dinesh Wadiwel.

At the same time EMST launches a major new publication, Considering Animals: An Encyclopaedia of Interspecies Understanding, a catalogue edited by Katerina Gregos and ioLi Tzanetaki, designed by Schema (Dimitra Chrona), with contributions by, among others, Sue Coe, Katerina Gregos, Terike Haapoja, Dr. Philip Low, Martin Rowe, Jonas Staal, Dimitris Tsoumplekas, ioLi Tzanetaki, and Kostis Velonis. 

Conceived as the exhibition’s reader, the publication assembles essays, artistic projects, an essential Abecedarium of key terms from animal studies, ethics, and environmental thought, as well as a bibliography. Addressing concepts such as speciesism, sentience, kinship, and zoopolitics, it proposes a shared vocabulary for navigating the ethical and philosophical terrain of contemporary human–animal relations. By bringing together voices from art, philosophy, law, and activism, the encyclopaedia invites readers to consider animals as co-inhabitants of a shared ecological and political world.

If the exhibition has posed the deceptively simple question “Why look at animals?”, its concluding events suggest that the act of looking must ultimately give way to something more demanding: a transformation in how humans not only consider animals but also understand their place within a multispecies community of life. In this sense, the finissage does not simply mark the end of a programme but gestures toward an ongoing process of reimagining coexistence.



Why Look at Animals? comes to an end with a Grand Finissage on April 16, featuring the premiere of a new performance by Panos Sklavenitis, as well as Sonic Space soundscapes by Dimitris Batsis, Jonáš Gruska, Kathy High, Panayiotis Kokoras, Dr. Roger Payne, Lisa Schonberg, Andrew Spyrou, Dimitris Tsoumplekas, Georges Salameh, Jana Winderen, and Peter Zinovieff; curated by Joanna Zielinska.

ΕΜSΤ Athens is one of the few national museums in the world to allow pets, who are welcome to visit the exhibitions with their owners.

For further information, please contact:
International press: Amanda Kelly and Vanessa Saraceno, Pickles PR / National Press: Marigo Siakka and Maria Tsolaki, EMST.

ΕΜSΤ / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens is funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The exhibition Why Look at Animals? is co-financed by ESPA 2021–27 in the framework of the approved project “EMST Exhibition 2025–26” with MIS code 6018632.