Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is a major group exhibition that centres on animal rights and animal well-being, highlighting the need to recognise and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that marginalises, oppresses and brutalises them. The exhibition is inspired by the seminal text of the same name by John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), which explores the animal-human relationship in modernity and how animals have become marginalised in human societies. With the participation of more than 60 artists from four continents and with over 200 works occupying all the floors of the Museum, Why Look at Animals? is the largest exhibition ever organized by EMΣT and the first major exhibition on non-human animal rights internationally.

The exhibition and public programme organised around it aim to raise awareness of the conditions of non-human animal life today – from the agricultural industry, the science lab and the business of entertainment, to the state of wildlife and animals subsisting in urban environments – asserting the personhood of animals as sentient beings, with unique intelligences of their own. Why Look at Animals? highlights the fact that the myriad species that exist alongside us are an integral part of our biosphere and ecosystems, not products and automata, separate from and subordinate to us. With this project EMΣT puts ecological justice and the rights of non-human life at the heart of its programming for the months to come. If humanity wants to engage with climate justice, biodiversity and environmental protection, non-human animals form an integral part of the discussion.

ROSSELLA BISCOTTI
For seventeen years during the mid-eighteenth century, a rhinoceros named Clara was toured through Europe as an exotic. specimen. She was brought to the Netherlands from Bengal on the private initiative of Douwe Jansz Mout van der Meer, a captain with the Dutch East India Company who understood the business potential of the animal, despite the investment and associated difficulties and expenses. The captain became famous for 'his' rhinoceros, with which he gave performances in several European countries.

Rossella Biscotti's installation Clara plays with the weight, value and investment relating to this exotic animal. Each brick in the three one-ton stacks of handmade bricks that constitute this installation bears a stamped outline of Clara, referencing her weight as commodity status and the Dutch colonial traders who used bricks as ballast in their ships going East. The pile of tobacco refers to the amount supposedly used to keep Clara calm during the voyages and the spectacles where she was paraded. A vinyl sticker shows the amount of gold écu (old French coin) that was unsuccessfully requested for the purchase of the animal by King Louis XV for his Versailles menagerie. Being defined in this work by inessential factors - its weight, its daily consumption of food and 'vices' (sea stories tell that the animal was addicted to tobacco), and its monetary value - the animal is here treated as an equivalent to a constantly fluctuating value that does not correspond to the unity of its being. Clara, in effect, is reduced to commodified equivalences and to an object-spectacle from which monetary and symbolic value are intended to be extracted.

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