This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
In 1934, after the Nazis seized power, Max Horkheimer, philosopher and leading figure of the »Frankfurt School«, was living in exile in Switzerland when he imagined capitalist class society as a skyscraper. At the very top he placed rival business magnates and rulers. Below them came large landowners, the educated bourgeoisie, the military, the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the proletariat, the »poor, the aged and the sick«. »It is only below these that we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises,« Horkheimer wrote—namely, the »colonial territories«. Below the spaces »where the coolies of the earth perish by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society, would have to be depicted, the sweat, blood, despair of the animals.« The cathedral on the roof, the slaughterhouse in the basement. This hell is our hell, where humans and animals alike are stripped of their souls, exploited, exterminated and discarded.
›Séance‹ is the title of an exhibition by the German-Iranian artist and animal-rights activist Lin May Saeed, who died in 2023, opening at Galerie Meyer Riegger during Berlin Art Week. In it, she confronts the animal hell we refuse to see, but also the animal paradise we dismiss as a phantasm—numbed as we are. For a long time, Saeed’s work was viewed simply as a convergence of art and animal-rights activism. Yet her work also addresses the people, conditions of production and ideologies that legitimise this slaughterhouse.
In 2013, Saeed and artist and activist Melanie Bujok recreated Horkheimer’s skyscraper as a several-metre-high protest model for an Occupy demonstration in Frankfurt. Her art always had a very direct purpose: like Agitprop, it sought to make another, peaceful world imaginable. To reach her audience, she drew on myths, legends, art history, fables, poetry, display panels, decoration, design, comedy and calligraphy.
For decades, Saeed remained an artist’s artist, revered by insiders and curators but little known beyond those circles. That only began to change towards the end of her life. In 2020, she received an institutional solo exhibition in the US at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, accompanied by a retrospective catalogue. In 2023 came ›The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise. A Dialogue with Renée Sintenis‹, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. Saeed’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany became a milestone—and her legacy. The artist, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, died just two weeks before it opened.
Three years later, the exhibition at Meyer Riegger makes it even clearer just how visionary and ahead of her time Saeed was—and why people struggled so much with her work. It wasn’t simply the Styrofoam, considered unfit for the museum, from which the former student of Tony Cragg carved her modernist reliefs with their almost biblical scenes, delicately painting them as though they had merely been dusted with colour. Nor was it their proximity to applied art. For animal-rights activists, Saeed wasn’t political enough: instead of depicting the suffering and exploitation of animals, she created utopias. Her reliefs have an almost childlike, fairy-tale quality that makes them deeply affecting. The art world found that suspect, too.
The exhibition once again unfolds Saeed’s idiosyncratic visual world: animals and humans hold séances and, transformed into creatures of legend, dream in caves for centuries of another world. Punks, Muslim women and octopuses find utopian asylum at Robben & Wientjes, the long-shuttered Kreuzberg car-hire company. It is mystical and comic, like Rumi’s Sufi poetry. The black lattice gate ›The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages XXII / Woman with Kid‹ (2019) looks like an East German illustration or an icon. It depicts a woman holding a young goat in one arm and a pair of bolt cutters in the other. Created between 2006 and 2020, the series comprises twenty-three works, including gates, reliefs, paper cuts and works on paper. The »gates« also draw inspiration from the homemade, decorated fences Saeed saw in Brandenburg. This DIY East German modernism was also ideologically charged, rooted in colonial thinking and a claim to dominance over animals, nature and the »Other«—just like the »exotic« décor of West German living rooms, the »African« masks and industrially produced primitive sculptures displayed on high-gloss shelving.
In Saeed’s work, different class affiliations and memories of the industrial societies of East and West mingle with influences from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, the aesthetics of Vladimir Mayakovsky and James Thurber’s animal fables. Added to these are references to the pared-back formal language of modern animal sculpture, including works by August Gaul and, of course, Renée Sintenis.
Saeed loved Wagner operas, Monty Python’s ›Life of Brian‹, and the paintings of Agnes Martin. She loved contradictions and used them as building materials for counter-models to the skyscraper. Looking at the animal sculptures on display—such as the combative mythical creature ›Kofi‹ (2019) or ›Pangolin‹ (2021), an animal that suddenly became widely known during the pandemic—it feels as though we are standing face to face with the essence of animal life. Anyone who knows dogs will soften at the sight of her sculpture ›Milo‹ (2023), a dog with its head bowed.
Saeed’s animal sculptures move us precisely because they are unpretentious, quiet and funny. Nothing in her work ever slips into sentimentality or pathos. That also has to do with the fact that she presents nothing as »finished«. No plinths, just wooden slat structures. White-painted bronze that looks like plaster or Styrofoam. Traces everywhere, cuts, raw edges. Everything remains a proposition, a model. The Styrofoam reliefs and paper cuts could be designs, stage sets for interspecies operas still waiting to be performed. The extraordinary thing is that from this sparseness, from this powerless art, springs a great romantic longing for a new world. Faced with the absence of a future, that energy feels necessary. But Saeed’s work also breaks your heart because it reminds us just how unimaginably far we are, right now, from her dreams.