Curator's Tour: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Join us for an in-person tour of the exhibition with curator Maria Hinel.

Francis Alÿs / Sara Anstis / Odonchimeg Davaadorj / Susan Eyre / Andy Holden / Jochen Lempert / Kat Lyons / Anne Marie Maes / Tiziana Pers / Amalia Pica & Rafael Ortega / Bryndìs Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson

Envisioning the possibilities of animal resistance against human abuse, this exhibition invites audiences to consider the lives of animals as sentient beings capable of communication, organisation and even vengeance. Dismantling the vision of non-human animals as voiceless and inert, the works in different ways grant them a space to act – to signal their unrest, seek freedom and express grievance.

Cases of animal resistance, while rarely acknowledged, occur with underreported regularity, often acting as paradoxical pathways to human identification with their plight. The artists in the exhibition present moments in which animals assert their presence and power – sometimes subtly, sometimes violently – subverting the entrenched hierarchy between the human and non-human. In doing so, the exhibition asks how empathy and respect might emerge from a recognition of animals as political and ethical agents in their own right.

The title of the exhibition references Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the environmentalist and feminist eco-thriller by Olga Tokarczuk, who in turn draws this title from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. The story is narrated by Janina Duszejko, an ageing former engineer, amateur translator of Blake and passionate animal rights advocate, whose outcry against hunting is consistently met with bewilderment and contempt. Local authorities and neighbours attribute her pleas to eccentricity, old age, as well as a ‘women’s instinct for caring.’ When a series of local hunters and a fox-farm owner die under mysterious circumstances, Duszejko insists on interpreting the events as acts of animal vengeance for sustained human cruelty: “It is highly possible that the Deer he persecuted inflicted summary justice... At the same time I petition for the Deer and other eventual Animal Culprits to go unpunished, because their alleged deed was a reaction to the soulless and cruel conduct of the victims, who were, as I have thoroughly investigated, active hunters.”

Powerfully exposing the deformity of the hunters’ view of animal suffering, the book also probes the representation of people concerned with animal liberation – a cause that is nonetheless increasingly recognised as a social justice movement. Echoing William Blake’s dark and prophetic vision of justice – one in which moral reckoning springs from the unsettling return of what has been systematically oppressed and ignored – the exhibition considers the agency of beings beyond the parameters of the rational that constitute the human worldview.

12 March – 18 April 2026
Hypha Studios, Gallery One, 1 Poultry, London, EC2R 8EJ

Opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11-6 PM

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