‘You don’t just touch something once’, observed the German–Iraqi artist and animal rights activist Lin May Saeed (1973–2023). This statement, part of a broader commentary on her creative process, serves both as an enigmatic introduction to Saeed’s exhibition on the 1st Floor Northern Gallery of Sapieha Palace and as a conceptual summary of the works on view – a fragment of her artistic legacy. Saeed’s creative and personal ambition to renounce an anthropocentric relationship with non-human life raises the question of the limits of human possibility and of humanity itself. In her artistic practice, this manifests through sustained and attentive engagement with matter and through a consistent rethinking of the depiction of humans, other animals, and their relationship, drawing on ancient traditions of representation while always imagining a more just future. The sculptures, reliefs, paintings, and drawings in the exhibition embody this idea – emphasising touch as the charged centre of encounter between the works and their viewers.
The senses of most animals are conventionally divided into five faculties – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – yet all of them, not just the last, are grounded in contact: sight arises when a beam of light strikes the retina; hearing begins with the vibration of the eardrum caused by sound waves; smell and taste are triggered when molecules come into contact with their respective receptors. Contact may be considered the foundation of the sensory structure – the condition for any encounter, the threshold that marks the boundary between inside and outside, between the self and the Other.
In the context of continuous interaction with the environment, contact is always more than a purely sensory function – it is touch in a broader sense: a metaphor for the temporal unfolding of the relationship between self and world, the basis of being and of knowing. In the constant flux of meaning, touch opens itself to indeterminacy: in trying to touch, we grasp only the surface; in relation to the Other, we acknowledge the unbridgeable gap that opens between us. Yet this is not a failure of connection but, rather, its ethical condition. Every touch carries within it the paradox of untouchability – closeness arises not by eliminating distance but by preserving it. Like holding hands: an intimate physical contact that seems to erase the division between two bodies but in fact exists only because of the thin line that separates your skin from the Other’s. Were this boundary to disappear, the bodies would fuse into an undifferentiated mass, and the very act of touching would cease to exist.
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In Saeed’s own words, ‘[Animals] are so much “the Other”, especially in man-made, predominantly monospeciesist urban environments. Trying to grasp the space between me and an animal, something opens up like a journey through time.’ The layered temporal references encoded in polystyrene speak of unknowability and resist the fixation of meaning. Like Saeed’s animal figures, they pause together with the viewer at the threshold of touch, charged with transgressive tension: between polystyrene – fleeting in its use but nearly permanent in its material presence – and the animal form, with which humans have maintained practical and mythical relations for millennia; between untouchability and the anticipation of connection; between fragility and the risk of damaging contact with a delicate artwork. This tension is not merely aesthetic or experiential – it is also political: it asks who may count as a subject; who is included within the field of legal visibility and protection; and who is left at the margins of the political fabric.
–Povilas Gumbis
Lin May Saeed: UNTOUCHABILITY
Oct 3 – Dec 15, 2025
Sapieha Palace
Vilnius, Lithuania
