Vive la Résistance! In the eye of the beholder

What if there exists a ‘resistance movement’ that we do not recognize or understand? A silent but persistent rebellion against human domination. What if non-human animals have been intentionally and purposefully fighting for their needs throughout the ages, and every manifestation of their struggle is in fact a manifestation of their own justice and ethics? Will valiant snails and bloodthirsty rabbits, like those painted in medieval marginalia, be responsible for changing the status quo, for changing the conditions under which we share space with each other – hitherto set by representatives of our species? And finally, how would the animal historian’s account of this rebellion differ from how it plays out in human imagination?

December 27th, 2007, at the San Francisco Zoo, a Siberian tigress named Tatiana leapt across a three-metre-high fence to exact revenge on three men who taunted her and the neighboring lions.

February 20th, 1991, Victoria, Canada and February 24th 2010, Orlando, USA. In two separate incidents 19 years apart, an orca named Tilikum drowned two female trainers by holding them down at the bottom of a pool.

2020-2024, the Strait of Gibraltar. A family of orcas capsizes nearly 700 yachts for reasons unknown.

In such cases, standard human narratives rely on the words: ‘accident’, ‘instinct’, ‘savage’, ‘incidental’. They portray the protagonists of these events as passive and mindless beings, denying purposefulness to their actions. Meanwhile, animals continually – in the face of exploitation, violence, and practices that deprive them of their territories and resources – challenge these reductive views by engaging in various forms of resistance. After all, can the tigress Tatiana be denied the moral high ground? In search of her tormentors, she circled the zoo for nearly half an hour, indifferently passing everyone else. She knew who she was looking for – those who were to suffer punishment. Why had Tilikum – held captive for decades – killed two trainers when not a single human being had ever suffered in the hundreds of attacks on yachts in the Strait of Gibraltar, nor in any other encounter with free-living orcas?

‘Vive la résistance!’ is a multi-faceted project developed by Marta Bogdańska, in which the author explores the nuanced ways in which animals challenge systems of oppression, asserting their autonomy despite their voices being largely misunderstood and silenced.

In its first public showing – in an exhibition entitled ‘In the eye of the beholder’ – the artist delves into stories and representations she has recovered from numerous archives, raising questions about the relationship between human and non-human points of view and examines our, often anthropomorphised, images of animal resistance.

She also reflects on areas of separation between humans and other animals, the negotiation of space among species, the reversal of the relationship between the beholder and the observed, and the possibilities of changing perspectives.

As the Nigerian proverb states – in this exhibition, Marta Bogdańska acts as the ‘lion historian’ and effectively deprives us of certainty as to which side of the bars or the aquarium glass we actually stand on and who is watching whom.