Lin May Saeed’s Acts of Cross-Species Empathy

Caution: animal crossing. A flurry of six, stampeding, four-legged animals, frozen mid-run, serves as the entry to ‘The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise’ – a fitting pairing of Lin May Saeed’s zoological sculptures with works by her 20th century antecedent, modernist sculptor Renée Sintenis. At the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, Sintenis’s bronze oxen, camels and gazelles from another era affectionately nuzzle with Saeed’s expressively rendered, near-life-size Pangolin, Calf and Anteater (all 2020), giving a sense of exhilaration, and even urgency, to this playful exhibition with serious undertones.

Saeed, who died this year at the age of 50, made animal liberation, ecological responsibility and human-animal relations the focus of her own too-brief life. Her work has a weightlessness buoyed by the unexpected levity she finds in such otherwise heavy themes. The sandy, faded hues of a relief imagining the Cambrian explosion (Cambrian Relief, 2016), for instance, or the coral-like texture of Sea Dragon Relief IV (2019) simultaneously lend the works an ancient, reliquary quality while somehow appearing as though they might have been fished out from some future, post-human era. Both resourceful and political, the artist’s topical choice of core material – reused Styrofoam – is rendered enticing through her thoughtful use of colour, chunky shapes and syncretic imagery, culled liberally from literature and legend.

Several of Saeed’s works draw from ancient myths, such as the story of Gilgamesh. Traditionally, Gilgamesh’s counterpoint and comrade, the wild man Enkidu, is depicted in ancient statuary as part animal. Legend has it that Enkidu wasn’t even aware he was human, in contrast to Gilgamesh, emblem of human tyranny. Saeed’s freestanding sculpture Enkidu and Jackal (2007) is a study in cross-species understanding. The two figures sit side by side in supplicant position. The work’s only colourful elements are the jackal’s internal organs – painted blue, purple, bright red and crimson – that glow like life itself. Through this simple gesture, the artist immediately induces us to feel empathy for the animal, just as Enkidu did himself, who, according to legend, freed animals from their traps.

For her part, Sintenis, who was born in western Prussia in 1888, was a mainstay of the salons and ateliers of Berlin’s modernist school of painters, sculptors and poets. By the time she was making her trademark animal figurines, the world had been overturned by war, economic upheaval and political sectarianism. All the more reason, then, for early 20th century artists and writers – who were only too aware of humanity’s capacity for destruction – to draw on myths and legends to summon an imagined past in which humans were more compassionate and closer to their animal brethren. Immediately arresting, Sintenis’s bronzes and drawings are, in themselves, an act of cross-species empathy.

Installed on the museum’s ground floor, the large sculpture Seven Sleepers (2020) feels like an altar. The work is Saeed’s rendering of an ancient tale – which persists across Biblical, Syriac and Koranic literature – about a group of Christians who hid in a cave to escape persecution by the Romans. Picturing the sleepers as a mixed crew of animals and people, Saeed nods to the ongoing scholarly debate around whether the seven sleepers were human or animal. When the sleepers awoke and emerged from the cave some 300 years later, the world had changed, and Christendom had spread like wildfire. Present global conditions – eerily reminiscent of those from Sintenis’s own time – might make many of us want to hide in a cave and see what the world is like when we emerge. I’d gladly sit it out next to one of Saeed’s smiling anteaters.

Lin May Saeed's ‘The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise. A Dialogue with Renée Sintenis’ is on view at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin until 25 February 2024

_{Main image: Lin May Saeed, ‘The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise. A Dialogue with Renée Sintenis’, 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: Georg Kolbe Museum; photograph: Enric Duch}