Helena: the live-fish installation and the court case that followed

An artwork built around a visitor’s choice

In 2000, Marco Evaristti exhibited Helena at the Trapholt museum in Kolding, Denmark.^[1] Ten blenders held live fish.^[1] Because the machines could be operated, visitors faced a choice with consequences for animals that had no choice at all. The installation made a spectator's ability to intervene part of the work.

A 2024 study in the journal Arts places Helena within a broader history of artworks involving living animals. It notes that the full installation, Helena & El Pescador, included more than the blenders.^[1] Photographs of that single element have nevertheless become its best-known representation.

The spectator's role was unusually direct. A visitor could encounter a machine that normally turns a substance into food, but the living fish made its operation a decision about another being. The work's ethical structure therefore depended on an available action, rather than on an image of violence alone.

The 2003 cruelty case and its limits

Two fish were killed during the original exhibition, according to contemporary Associated Press reporting.^[2] Museum director Peter Meyer refused to pay a police fine and the matter went to court.^[2] He was acquitted in May 2003 after evidence about how quickly the fish died.^[2]

That verdict answered the legal case against Meyer. It did not settle the ethical question of using living animals as the material of an artwork, nor should a witness's claim about suffering be presented as a universal scientific finding. The controversy concerned who bore responsibility: the person pressing a switch, the artist who created the possibility, or the museum that supplied the setting.

The prosecution illustrates the difference between assigning legal liability and allocating ethical responsibility. Evidence about speed of death bore on the particular cruelty charge. It did not answer whether a museum should create the danger, invite visitors to decide or make an animal's survival part of the attraction.

Later exhibitions with replica fish

The installation's later history also changes the story. The Arts study reports, on information from a Trapholt curator, that the museum's presentations in 2012, 2013 and 2017 used plastic fish in silicone gel.^[1] Those versions preserved the visual arrangement without recreating the original danger to living fish.

Replacing fish with replicas changes that structure. Later visitors could still see the unsettling pairing of aquarium and appliance, but they could no longer produce the same injury. The installation's visual identity continued while its practical consequences changed, showing that a work's exhibition history can matter as much as its original photograph.

Calling every later display another opportunity to kill an animal is therefore inaccurate. Helena's history includes an initial exhibition, an animal-cruelty prosecution and altered versions. The alterations are part of the work's reception, not a minor detail to omit from a story built around its most shocking photograph.