Global celebrities, including Irish actor Jessie Buckley, have been photographed naked with fish as part of an NGO campaign against overfishing.
The photographs form an exhibition outside the European Parliament until the end of this week.
The campaign by NGOs Fishlove and Our Fish calls on EU Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius and all EU governments to “finish the job of ending overfishing and deliver a just transition to low-impact and low-carbon fishing for the EU fishing fleet”.
The participants include Jean-Marc Barr (FR/US), Greta Scacchi (IT/AU), Helena Bonham Carter (UK), Gillian Anderson (UK/US), Judi Dench (UK), Sean Penn (US) and Vicky Krieps (LU/DE),
There are also images of the late Rutger Hauer (NL), Mélanie Bernier (FR), Nicolas Bro (DK), Jessie Buckley (IRL), Tom Wlaschiha (DE), Benja Bruijning (NL), Melanie Laurent (FR), Nina Hoss (DE), Giovanni Soldini (IT), Caroline Ducey (FR), Soenil Bahadoer (NL), Natalie Madueno (ES/DK), Emma Thompson (UK).
Buckley is photographed with a sturgeon, while Gillian Anderson is photographed with an eel.
"In my Fishlove portrait, I dance with a dead 75kg mako shark,”Jean-Marc Barr, French-American film actor and director, says.
“It is a Dance of Death. But in dancing with one dead fish, I hope to have made people realise that all species of shark are in danger,” he said in a statement released by the NGOs.
“. Sharks will disappear from our planet if overfishing doesn't stop. I hope my image will one day be called a Dance of Life, in a future when we will have changed our ways and saved our oceans and all the creatures that live in them,” Barr said.
Joint founder of the NGO Fishlove, Italian-Australian actress Greta Scacchi, said the campaign “came about because we wanted to draw public attention to the way overfishing is destroying our oceans”.
“Since I had my portrait taken naked with a fish in 2009, Fishlove has become an ever-growing visual petition of actors and artists who want to put a stop to the over-exploitation of our seas,” she said.
”The portraits are an attempt to remind us of the interdependence that exists between ourselves and the sea creatures that we are often more comfortable thinking of as alien, Scacchi added.
“The images demand our attention. They demand an answer from our politicians as to why overfishing is still happening when everyone now knows it is bringing the marine ecosystem to the verge of collapse,” she said.
She is due to attend a gala event, where Commissioner Sinkevičius and MEP Ska Keller are also due, at the Brussels Museum of Natural Sciences.
Our Fish programme director Rebecca Hubbard said that fish are the “carbon engineers of the ocean, providing it with the capacity to mitigate the impacts of climate change”.
“Naked celebrities with fish might seem controversial, but undermining the ocean’s capacity to tackle climate change is far worse,” Hubbard said.