Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives

Elisabetta Benassi, Rossella Biscotti, Denicolai & Provoost, Tiziana Pers, and Marta Roberti are the Italian artists participating in the group exhibition "Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives" at the EMST Museum in Athens, curated by Katerina Gregos, from May 16, 2025, to February 15, 2026.

The exhibition focuses on animal rights and welfare, highlighting the need to recognize and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that marginalizes, oppresses, and brutalizes them. The show draws inspiration from John Berger’s seminal text of the same name, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), which explores the human-animal relationship in modernity and how animals have been marginalized in human societies. Featuring over 60 artists from four continents and more than 200 works occupying all floors of the museum, Why Look at Animals? is the largest exhibition ever organized by EMST and the first major international exhibition on non-human animal rights.

In the image: Tiziana Pers, Saut dans le vide (still), 2016, Courtesy of the artist.

other exhibitions

all the exhibitions

exhibition29 July 2025 Sofia Silva’s first exhibition in the United States at Andrew Kreps in New York Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce "Spoiled by Freud", Sofia Silva’s first exhibition in the United States, from September 5 to November 1, 2025

Autobiographical in nature, Silva’s new paintings are deeply intertwined with her relationship to psychoanalysis. The daughter of two psychoanalysts, Silva has been immersed in the practice since childhood. For Silva, psychoanalysis has become a consistent interpretative lens that informs how she looks at the world. It is an unceasing gaze that alternates between an extreme tolerance of humanity, and an understanding of the intolerance that same humanity is able to enact. This analytic framework translates to an analytic approach to painting, in which images are deconstructed, and reconfigured in constellatory compositions.

Figurative details are dislocated within abstract landscapes, and collaged elements, often physically extracted and repurposed from her previous paintings, dot the surface of her works. Shaped by fields of negative space, Silva’s paintings initially present as fragmentary, though when brought together, they begin to form a deeply intimate narrative that spans two distinct phases of her psychoanalytic journey. Conceived as episodes representing specific moments in her life, Silva’s paintings move from the tensions of her youth, to the anxieties of adulthood, illness, nostalgia, and anger, forming distinct stations of a personal Via Crucis. Encouraging the viewer to immerse themselves freely with the origin and content of each work, detailed information sheets are available during the duration of the exhibition.

Writing on Silva’s work, Bice Curiger said: “Sofia Silva is a master of shifting perspectives, where forms hover on the brink of transformation, poised between opposing states. At first, we are reassured by the delicate, the intimate, the ethereal: a quiet counterpoint to ostentatious gesture. Yet as we venture further into her universe, even these certainties dissolve, and we find ourselves holding our breath at the audacity of her grand-scale compositions, with their infinitely subtle tonalities and vast, uncharted voids. As Meret Oppenheim once wrote in a poem: ’with an enormous little, much.’”

Sofia Silva (b. 1990, Padua) lives and works in Padua. Past solo exhibitions of her work include Notizie da lei, Barbati Gallery, Venice, 2025, Melania Pieve Mostarda, Una Boccata d’Arte - Fondazione Elpis, Milan, 2024, and Consolations, Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico, Turin, 2023. Silva received a BFA in Visual Arts and Theater in 2012, and MA in the History of Art and Preservation of Artistic Heritage in 2016, and in 2025, a BPsych in Techniques and Methods of Psychological Science. In addition to her artistic practice, Silva has written extensively on art for the past decade. Her texts have been commissioned by institutions including La Quadriennale di Roma, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, and Kunsthalle Wien. exhibition28 July 2025 Anna Franceschini at the Kunstverein Gartenhaus in Vienna From September 4 to November 15, Kunstverein Gartenhaus presents "Nights Out", Anna Franceschini’s first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna, jointly curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and Ilaria Gianni.

In her practice, Anna Franceschini explores the multiple ways of displaying commodities. Underlying her exploration of reality is cinema through its constituent elements: movement, light, framing, and editing. Kinetic sculptures, choreographed performances, “bachelor(ette) machines”—which inject femininity into the Duchampian idea of apparatus, and Xerox copies, are for the artist a “cinema by other means.” Franceschini’s work seeks to expand the concept of animation in sculptural terms. Reversing the ends of the discussion about “cinema as machine,” she redirects the gaze toward the hypothesis of a “machine as cinema.” By creating sculptures intended as moving images, she turns commodities into quasi-living beings and fabricates devices whose subjectivity is emphasized within a mise-en-scène.

The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide. exhibition25 July 2025 Open call for a residency at Gasworks, London sponsored by Fondazione Memmo Fondazione Memmo and Gasworks have launched the sixth edition of the call for a residency scholarship at Gasworks, in London, from January 7 to March 23, 2026. Application Deadline: 25 August 2025, 1pm (UK time).

As part of Fondazione Memmo's mission, the residency for artists based in Italy focuses on practitioners interested in working outside their local context bringing Italian contemporary art into an international arena. Past participants include Diego Marcon (2020), Adelaide Cioni (2022), Francis Offman (2023), Alice Visentin (2024), Alessandro Di Pietro (2025).

Gasworks’ residency, curated by Ilaria Puri Purini, is an opportunity for self-led professional development, artistic exchange and experimentation. It encourages artists to undertake new research and widen their networks in order to support the development of their practice.

By clicking on the link below you can find all the information needed to send the applications:

https://gasworks.org.uk/opportunities/residency-open-call-for-italian-artists-based-in-italy-2026 exhibition26 June 2025 At Palacio Libertad in Buenos Aires, the exhibition "Pittura italiana oggi. Una nuova scena" From June 26 to September 21, 2025, Triennale Milano and theItalian Cultural Institute in Buenos Aires will presentPittura italiana oggi. Una nuova scena(Italian Painting Today: A New Scene)at thePalacio Libertad, Centro Cultural Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. The exhibition is an initiative promoted by theMinistry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, with support from the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires.

Conceived by Triennale Milano and curated by Damiano Gullì—Curator of Contemporary Art and Public Programs at the Milanese institution—the exhibition is being shown outside Italy for the first time in Buenos Aires. Its presentation in the Argentine capital has been made possible through close collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, which curated and coordinated the local staging.