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Diana Al–Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1981 and she currently lives and practices her art in Brooklyn, New York. This interview with Al–Hadid is an engagement with just one voice from the Syrian diaspora. The text explores the artist’s methods and strategies in art making for the purpose of recording new primary sources in the History of Art, which can be used to generate different ways of understanding Al–Hadid’s sculptures. The various themes discussed in the interview including: the artist’s engagements with materials and materiality; the formal qualities in her art; historical and art historical influences such as the Islamic Golden Age and Old Master painting; her attention to the original and editions; and the three broad spheres of typologies which are located in her oeuvre. In addition, Al–Hadid reveals her various processes of making which lead to the location of the first artistic mark on a new work of art.

The Introduction discusses the widespread mistrust of contemporary art that deals with animals, and argues for the necessary connection of creativity and trust. Testing this to the limit by examining two artworks that brought about animals’ deaths, it explains why choosing neither to condone nor to condemn such works may be the only means by which anything will be learned from them.

Chapter 6 illustrates the considerable diversity of practice within apparent singleness of purpose for Sue Coe, Britta Jaschinski and Angela Singer, three artists with a shared commitment to animal rights, but also points to the spaces of uncertainty that are central to their work.

Chapter 7 proposes three distinct exploratory perspectives on the ways animals figure in the works discussed in the preceding chapters, and in a few further examples. They concern questions of place, form and medium. The last of these considers whether the animal itself could be said to be the medium in which these artists are working.

Chapter 5 presents an account of Catherine Bell’s performance with forty dead squid in order to unpack some difficult questions about control, improvisation, and the relation of intentions to outcomes both for the artist and for her viewers.

Chapter 4 uses the living peafowl in a Mircea Cantor installation to introduce questions about how art is or is not spoken about, and elaborates on those questions with reference to the work of Mary Britton Clouse, spokesperson for the Justice for Animals Arts Guild.

Chapter 2 examines the way in which Lucy Kimbell’s rat-themed performance lecture gradually shaped its own ethical agenda as it explored the “different kinds of knowledge, desire and disgust” prompted by these creatures.

Chapter 3 finds a degree of common ground between Catherine Chalmers’ photographic work with cockroaches and Eduardo Kac’s transgenic projects, in terms of how these to artists position and pace themselves in relation to the animals whose bodies figure (and are refigured) in their work.

Turning to examples with a more immediate concern for animal life, Chapter 1 explores the relation of spontaneity and reflection in Olly and Suzi’s environmental art practice, and the manner in which each new encounter with animals can shape the form of that practice and the artists’ understanding of it.

I outline the implications of a literality of ghosts for mourning, ethics, and ongoing relations with the dead. I reiterate the limitations of biopolitical and psychoanalytic theory (in some of its versions), for recognizing and escaping the latent Christian logics of contemporary approaches to death.