Greenpeace Installs Anish Kapoor’s ‘Butchered’ Artwork on Shell’s North Sea Platform

Greenpeace has installed a new work by conceptual artist Anish Kapoor on Shell’s Skiff platform in the North Sea.

To install the artwork, titled ‘Butchered’, seven Greenpeace climbers boarded and scaled the gas platform, some 45 nautical miles off the Norfolk coast.

After securing a 12×8 m canvas to one side of the structure, the activists hoisted a high-pressure hose on top of the canvas and pumped 1,000 litres of blood-red liquid onto it. The artwork and blood-like solution were both designed specifically for this purpose.

According to Greenpeace, ‘Butchered’ is a “stark visualisation of the wound inflicted on both humanity and the Earth by the fossil fuel industry, evocative of our collective grief and pain at what has been lost, but also a cry for reparation”.

The organisation also claimed that this was the world’s first artwork to be installed at an active offshore gas site.

“The carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels is invisible, but we are witnessing the devastation that its extraction wreaks on our world. I wanted to make something visual, physical, visceral to reflect the butchery they are inflicting on our planet,” said Anish Kapoor.

He added that ‘Butchered’ was an action that happened at the place where “this violation starts – a gas platform in the middle of the sea”.

Anish Kapoor is the latest figure to join the Polluters Pay Pact, a global Greenpeace initiative backed by firefighters, political leaders, unions, humanitarian groups, and individuals, calling on governments to make “big polluters pay for the climate damage they’ve caused”.

This is not the first time Kapoor has challenged the fossil fuel industry. In 2019, he joined other artists in calling on London’s National Portrait Gallery to cut ties with oil giant BP.