In Not not a metaphor, looking becomes a form of soft violence, a discipline disguised as attention. Bodies appear, performing, playing, idling, already adapted to being watched. The dolphin arcs like punctuation. The mangabey blinks through the glass, rehearsing presence. Elsewhere, the artist’s daughters move as jesters without an audience, drifting through a glowing warehouse that mirrors the zoo’s logic of display while emptying it of payoff.

The work traces a choreography of interspecies proximity: not quite touch, not exactly care. Bodies are trained to fit and perform. The jesters undo this training, costumed, visible, and purposeless, exposing performance as labour without reward, attention without reciprocity. Desire slips the human frame, leaking across species lines. What remains is not love, but the residue of contact: the porous memory of bodies trying to mean something to each other after the audience has gone.

Hertta Kiiski is a visual artist whose photographs, videos, and installations depict worlds in which the everyday begins to waver: the glare and vertigo of existence, the unravelling of anthropocentrism, and planet-scale processes drift through one another. Kiiski’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally.