→ Anthropocene Museum 9.0: The Old Sharjah Slaughterhouse Tour

The ninth instalment of Cave Bureau’s “Anthropocene Museum” research series constitutes the adaptation and tour of Sharjah’s old slaughterhouse, whose primary protagonists are the animals – cows, goats, sheep, and camels – consumed in the city; often without thought of their origins or how they are processed. The audience is corralled through an ever-present, but seldom reflected upon, municipal event space, in a building that is now only intermittently used.

Visitors will experience a variety of ambient sounds, drawings, projections, and installations that tell of a world steeped in a deranged consumerist culture deeply embedded in an enslaved human consciousness. On a global scale, man-induced livestock proliferation has constituted the greatest biomass of mammalian life on earth, with animals being a commodity sold to the highest-paying suitor. In equal and potent measure, human beings have been commodified through capitalism, auctioned to the highest bidder. A reference to a recent, near-forgotten past also emerges; enslaved Africans were led from the Indian Ocean shores to the Gulf by Arab merchants — like livestock.

At the core of the exhibit lies the philosophical underpinning of meaningful impermanence. In life, only death is certain, everything else is in flux. Visitors are encouraged to view the ever-shifting built landscape of life as an opportunity for reversed notions of growth through introspection and spiritual reconnection. It asks one to accept the need to adapt through a new planetary consciousness that embraces meaningful impermanence without us building almost anything at all.