The artist’s long-standing animal rights activism provided a foundational narrative for the exhibition. Building on Saeed’s previous works, such as Mammoth Relief (2017), a Styrofoam tablet depicting acts of animal cruelty, headed with the text “Minding Animals Conference,” the show scrutinized the complex and imbalanced relationship between humans and animals, reflecting how we are irrefutably dependent on them for our physical, spiritual and emotional needs, yet willfully ignorant of their values. This was epitomized in the exhibition by Auf dem Floβ/On the Float (2007), a pseudo-mythological frieze centered around a free-floating elephant head that highlights the contradictions in hunting animals with spiritual significance for profit.

Saeed’s provocation for audiences to undertake the responsibility for change was embodied in other works. Hanging next to Antispe Kongress (2008)—a pile of posters illustrated by the artist advertising a 2008 convention on anti-specism—was a large paper cut. Bee (2018) is backlit and framed by an alcove, a configuration that borrows from the language of iconic figuration and the space’s history as a church. Yet, rather than an aspirational image to be adored, the simplistic figure with a toothy smile, whose hands are about to catch and kill a bee, is emblematic of those who discriminate against certain living beings based on their species. Further, the figure’s innocuous expression betrays the imbalance of powers between humans and animals, and our ambivalence in acknowledging this. As Saeed posits, denial is what defines the contemporary anthropocene.