From an early age, Marlene Dumas learned to look closely at animals. As a child, she would visit Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam with her father, where they sketched elephants side by side. This shared practice of observing—quiet, attentive, and unhurried—left a lasting imprint on her way of seeing. Many years later, near the end of her father’s life, as he lived with Alzheimer’s disease, they returned to the zoo for one final visit. In the pencil drawings he made that day, the elephants appear as loose abstractions, carrying a raw immediacy and sincerity reminiscent of children’s art, where expression precedes precision.
This sensitivity toward animals runs throughout Dumas’ work. Her book emerges as an attempt to give weight and presence to these beings, offering a meditation on the complex relationships between humans and animals and the ethical necessity of empathy toward other sentient lives. These concerns also shape Entendue, an ongoing, multi-media project that investigates the cultural heritage of (Asian) elephants through the afterlives of ivory objects housed in museum collections, where histories of admiration, exploitation, and displacement quietly converge.
