I just wanted a coffee, but who could help but stop and stare? The rats in the window appeared to be swinging on little wire trapezes. This was a misreading of the window display, of course, or a whimsical trick of peripheral vision that is always hoping for the best: upon looking more closely, one quickly registers the stiff-slumped affect of the animals and the glassiness of their eyes, the downward dangle of forepaws which was never meant to convey energy or attempt a tableau vivant. These taxidermied rats are famous. The ones in the window of Paris pest control shop Julien Aurouze & Co. Drooping from the semi-circular wire traps snared around their necks and arranged above the shop’s more conventional products, including modern caulking kits and anti-termite powder sold in bright pink cans, the lowest row of rats is fixed at a height so that any onlooker crossing, squinting and tilting their head to read the supplied explanatory sign – ‘RATS SURMULOTS (RATS D’EGOUTS) CAPTURÉS AUX HALLES VERS 1925’ – will find their reflection in the window doubled back at them. Beneath will be a rank of dangling tails.

The window display on Rue des Halles has the stubborn confidence of an advertising chutzpah that will outlive any cultural squeamishness at death or sensitivity when it comes to its recreation. Certainly there is success there, too, with the shop earning attention, and footfall: whether thrilled by a perceived aesthetic esotericism, or else compelled by the shop’s non-standard refusal to sanitise either the verminous, and the specific destructive (and systemised destructive, at that) aspect of its wares and craft, the rats certainly bring an audience. The trapeze-like traps, the can-can dancers organised into serried sequence, the curtain pull of the tails: these embalmed figures are arranged for a viewership, and theatrical in a way that feels both cruel and quaint. Passersby slow down, recoil, grin and photograph, while the glass does its work: one looks without risk. The rats enact scenes of their capture and a punishment as if caught mid-narrative, miming choreographies of efficient extermination, but the effect is oddly festive. This is not mourning, and not quite mannequin; it is a display, bunting!, where pest control is presented as spectacle, and Aurouze & Co.’s expertise rendered legible through an exhibition of its trophies. If the look of the rats makes one uneasy, dismay is neutralised a little by a kitsch or kitschifying sense that this display belongs to another time, another Paris, so that something like nostalgia does much of the ethical lifting.

Rats, of course, are rarely allowed this kind of ambiguity, and culturally they tend to arrive pre-loaded with meaning: contagion, filth, betrayal, excess. They are animals that can usefully operate as shorthand and often in literature even a passing reference to a rat is enough to activate a long chain of associations, many of them contradictory. Rats are disgusting, but fascinating; cowardly, but ingenious; everywhere and nowhere, often haunting the edges of stories. They are also pressed into service as metaphors for human behaviour under pressure: the rat race, the lab rat, ratting someone out, the dirty rat, with each idiom does a particular kind of work, compressing social anxiety and industry into an animal, feral, organised form.

Both art and American behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner agree that rats can be exemplary subjects. They survive by adapting, learn systems quickly and respond to incentive and threat. Earlier this year at Modern Art Oxford I saw Bronte Wyse’s installation Where Humans Live, Rats Live (2025), feeling a kinship between it and the horrifying, compelling Paris shopfront. The relationship between the two is architectural as much as thematic; where the shop window uses glass to separate viewer from viewed, Wyse’s work multiplies that separation into a system of thirty-two cabinet-like enclosures with illuminated interiors that form a circular, panoptic structure. Some contain screens showing surveillance footage of the artist in her bedroom, subtitled with AI-generated commentary, while others feature rats in monitored spaces. Others hold accessories, objects, ceramic and 3D-printed rats – artefacts rather than bodies. The figures of the rats nestling there are rigid, cold, but also dollopy, glitch-smooth: you want to run a finger along the contours of them, but the glass front of their enclosures reminds you to keep your hands in your pockets. They are for a viewership. The whiskerless rats in the Paris storefront have their beaded eyes averted from the viewer, looking up at the overhead lights; the whiskerless 3D-printed rats in Wyse’s work have no eyes. Their identifiable but odd shape makes them a weird mix of fixed, stiff and bulging; mutable. They are speculative objects, occupying the same uneasy space as AI itself: familiar, but not quite knowable.

The installation borrows the visual language of the pet shop, the laboratory, the prison. Each of the boxes is an invitation to look, and for the onlooker this feels faintly illicit due to the video footage. The recorded access to the bedrooms is particularly destabilising as it is a space culturally coded as private, intimate, unobserved that is now subjected to motion tracking and AI interpretation. The narration sourced from ChatGPT does not simply describe but has the potential to reframe what has been noticed. It reminds us that being watched often means being processed, categorised, frozen into legibility: the artist becomes an experimental subject, her movements followed, recorded, narrated by a machine. Privacy dissolves not through force, but through witting participation. A clipboard hangs by the enclosures, putting forth a thesis and analysing data. The parallel surveillance of rats and human collapses the distance between species, so that the (tame, bred-for-it) rat’s enclosure becomes a mirror directly for observed human behaviour. Wyse explicitly references the Panopticon, and the comparison does hold: The circular arrangement, the sense of an unseen observer, and the notion of surveillance, actual and internalised, are all present. But where Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon relied on theories of architectural dominance, Wyse’s rat-borne revisioning is more ambient. Perhaps the observer is present not just in the guise of a guard, but as an inquisitive system, someone who gets to choose what they want to watch. Someone who can sip a coffee, find a better rat to distract their attention.

Walking around the installation, it becomes difficult to locate oneself cleanly. The viewer peers into the enclosures, but is also implicated in the logic they enact where to look is to participate. The darkened room heightens the sense of complicity; the glowing boxes pull focus, demand attention. One is reminded that the Panopticon works best when its subjects collaborate – when they watch themselves. Outside, on the Parisian street, the collaboration is easier to ignore. The rats are safely dead. The window frames them as warning, joke, heritage. In the Pixar film Ratatouille, a version of the shop appears briefly as moral instruction: this is what happens when a rat becomes too comfortable around humans. But comfort, as Wyse’s work suggests, is precisely the danger. Surveillance does not announce itself with traps and trophies but is offered or applied as a convenience, or to provide safety, insight. One agrees to it. One invites it into the bedroom.

The exhibition’s inclusion of a constant scuffling, snuffling, rootling and rustling soundtrack of rats follows you down the hallway as you step aside. Traffic and industry. I think of the sound of mopeds on Rue des Halles, the commuters’ footsteps, and tourists burning their lips on hurried coffees as they step off the kerb. I assume the rats hang there in the Aurouze windows, suspended. The rats are arranged so that their backs are towards the viewer but the angle of their trapped heads is such that, even turned away from us, a version of their eyes is fully visible, mid-fall, forever caught in the act of being seen. These are rats not expected to look back or to ever meet our gaze, nor provide any commentary. Maybe the appeal of the window, and what about their transfixion snags our attention and keeps an audience transfixed, is that on some level we are willing them to stare back at us. Catch our eye, whether to call us out as complicit in their death or to angle for a Tripadvisor score. If they did lock eyes with us, at least we could blame a trick of the light or a coincidence of reflections. It would be hard to tell through the glass.