Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Hypha Gallery 1 / No. 1 Poultry, London EC2R 8EN

PV: Thursday, 12th March 2026, 6-9pm

Open: 13 March – 18 April 2026

Taking as a point of departure the environmentalist and feminist novel by Olga Tokarczuk titled ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’, the exhibition seeks to imagine a world in which animals resist human abuse. Considering the agency of animals through speculative narratives, it invites audiences to reflect on the lives of animals with empathy and consideration.

Tokarczuk’s novel is set in a remote Polish village, where a series of mysterious deaths of local hunters and authority figures occur. The story is narrated by Janina Duszejko, an eccentric former engineer and passionate animal rights advocate, who interprets the events as a form of retribution for human cruelty toward animals. In effect, the novel interrogates human dominance over nature and challenges the ethical blindness of societies complicit in animal suffering.

In his book On Humour, Simon Critchley posits and interrogates the conventional divide between humans and animals: “Helmut Plessner’s thesis is that the life of animals is zentrisch, it is centred. This means that the animal simply lives and experiences. By contrast, the human being not only lives and experiences, he or she experiences those experiences. That is, the human being has a reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself.” Our inability to conclusively prove or disprove animals’ capacity for self-reflection, laughter, or suffering has propagated the assumption of their inferiority and otherness.

Highlighting the ‘centred’ experience in humans and the potentially ‘de-centred’ and self-aware experience in animals, the works challenge our conventional attitudes towards animals and towards ourselves as a species. Proposed artists include Emma Cousin, Susan Eyre, Andy Holden, Jochen Lempert, Anne Marie Maes, Abi Palmer, and Nissa Nishikawa.

The exhibition aims to bring in new audiences and explore this urgent theme, which has paradoxically remained relatively invisible in the context of UK-wide exhibition programming.

Emma Cousin

Susan Eyre

Andy Holden

Jochen Lempert

Anne Marie Maes

Abi Palmer