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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Curated by Maria Hinel
12th March, 2026 – 18th April, 2026
Hypha Studios
Gallery One
1 Poultry, London
EC2R 8EJ
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
“You have more compassion for animals than for people” “That’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both. But nobody shoots at defenceless people. At least not these days.”
– Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
What happens when animals are no longer cast as mute victims of human power, but recognised as sentient beings with the capacity to communicate, organise, resist and, at times, retaliate? This exhibition begins with that unsettling proposition, asking audiences to look again at the lives of non-human animals and the structures of domination that have long rendered them passive in the cultural imagination.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Across the exhibition, artists challenge the habit of treating animals as voiceless, inert or merely symbolic. Instead, the works open a space in which animals act. They signal unrest, press towards freedom and register grievance. Some do so quietly, through gestures that disturb the everyday order of things. Others confront violence with violence, fracturing the hierarchy that places the human above all else.
Instances of animal resistance are seldom centred in public discourse, yet they recur with striking regularity. They are often underreported, dismissed or stripped of meaning. Here, those moments are brought into focus as sites of ethical and political consequence. In recognising acts of refusal, the exhibition also considers the strange and often paradoxical routes by which humans come to identify with animal suffering.
The artists gathered here attend to the many ways animals assert presence and power. Their works do not sentimentalise. Nor do they reduce the animal to metaphor. Instead, they ask what becomes possible when non-human life is understood as more than a backdrop to human drama. From this shift emerges a more demanding question: how might empathy and respect take shape once animals are recognised as agents in their own right?
The exhibition takes its title from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk’s environmentalist and feminist eco-thriller, itself borrowing from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Tokarczuk’s novel is narrated by Janina Duszejko, an ageing former engineer, amateur translator of Blake and fierce advocate for animal rights. Her opposition to hunting is met not with serious attention, but with ridicule and condescension. Local officials and neighbours explain away her outrage as eccentricity, senility and a supposedly feminine excess of care.
As a series of hunters and a fox-farm owner die in mysterious circumstances, Duszejko advances a scandalous interpretation: that the animals have exacted revenge. She insists, “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.”
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead That passage sits at the heart of the exhibition’s intellectual and emotional charge. Tokarczuk’s novel lays bare the moral distortion required to normalise animal suffering, while also exposing the ways those who speak for animal liberation are caricatured or marginalised. Yet the politics it invokes no longer sit at the fringes. Animal rights is increasingly understood within the wider framework of social justice, where questions of vulnerability, domination and representation remain inseparable.
In that sense, the exhibition moves beyond allegory. It draws on Blake’s prophetic language of justice, where reckoning arrives through the return of what has been suppressed, ignored or denied moral standing. What surfaces here is not only the pain of the oppressed, but their force. By attending to beings that exceed the limits of a narrowly rational human worldview, the exhibition asks viewers to confront a harder truth: that animals are not only subjects of care, but actors in histories of conflict, survival and resistance.
This is an exhibition about power, but also about perception. It asks what we fail to see when we insist on the silence of others. And it suggests that a more ethical relation to animal life may begin not in pity, but in recognising the presence, intelligence and will that have been there all along.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Curated by Maria Hinel opens on the 12th of March, 2026 until the 18th of April, 2026 at Hypha Studios©2026 Hypha Studios
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