They Have Families Too
Abe Orobia
10th Solo Exhibition by Abe Orobia
words by Philip Paraan
John Berger’s essay Why Look Animals, part of his book About Looking published in 1977 where he explored humanity’s view and how we engage with other living beings offer some parallel insights and alignment to Abe Orobia’s concerns. As Berger asserted, in distancing ourselves from animals and the natural world, we also lose touch with aspects of our own humanity. It is because of this ecology and codependency in nature, all the more reason artists like him are becoming more increasingly aware that conversations must be sustained if we care for our own survival.
“They Have Families Too” Abe Orobia’s 10th solo exhibition at Art Verite is an act of cross-species empathy and sheds light on the environment with a hum of ecological reverence, responsibility and mutualism. In fact, his most recent exhibition, “Spirit of the Wild”, at the recent World Art Dubai last April 2025, also echoed such attention on ecological and wildlife themes not just with artistic thinking but moral perspective. However, Orobia’s meditation on nature and wild species is not just a current thematic choice but has always been a point of interest since he was younger and a significant part of his childhood imaginaries and creative formation.
Premised with a great deal of refusal, Orobia counterpoints this skewed and fractured anthropocentric view that animals are lesser beings which is a prevailing bias in human culture. While abiding by his belief all sentient beings are equal, his deft renditions of wildlife scenes do explore how humans and animals are more alike than we may admit while also looking at the edifying contrasts and the boundaries that keep these two species apart.
This is the very reason why he tenderly frames these wild species as family units in their intimate moments as groups as they quietly bond and flock together in their territories and natural habitat. Visibly, they are amid acts of foraging, grooming or nuzzling each other as their display of bonding and social cohesion, defensive strategies and more.
They convey the range of interactions and social behaviors exhibiting their collective functioning and dynamics and are notions that are palpably available in the animal kingdom and humankind.
In the production of these images, Orobia, in fact, turned to the work of some international wildlife photographers including Yaron Schmid, Meaghan Garrahan, and Dr. Cesar Espiritu, using composites of their images as inspiration for this collection.
These may be straightforward images of wildlife cut out from magazines but they present something more. They are visual statements with deeper undertones and are attempts to look into the unstable ecologies where we are all dependent for survival. While we can interpret and view these artworks from various views and positions, at best, they are allegorical which implore and summon us to act with urgency in taking care of what’s left in the wild and the natural order.
His intentional use of discarded aluminum paint tubes repurposed as surface components to his artworks verily signify his commitment to nature and the ecosystem also making it his direct intervention and response to the palpable and continuing erosion of the balance in the natural world.
By and large, there’s a need to reinvigorate more conversations about humanity’s capacity for destruction and incessant ways of turning back on the environment and this includes the alienation of animals and the problematic aspects of human culture with regard to non-human life. Again borrowing from Berger’s words, “We must not forget that we are human and that we need to be human” and this means to be responsible and kind stewards of the natural world and to acknowledge our place in the larger ecological web. Ultimately, the exhibition invites us to rethink how we view, treat, and inhabit our environment.
