Supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

25 June – 29 November 2009, Natural History Museum

Leading artists and writers have been brought together for the first time to look beyond Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for the Natural History Museum’s summer contemporary arts exhibition After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions.

New and existing work from Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with Richard Wiseman, Diana Thater, award-winning author Mark Haddon and poet Ruth Padel alongside existing work by Bill Viola and Tina Gonsalves explore Charles Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The works investigate today’s cultural perspectives on human-animal kinship and the study of emotional expressions.

The gallery has been transformed into a highly choreographed architectural environment, created by the exhibition designers Carmody Groake. By constructing a sequence of geometric shapes that accommodate the individual artworks, the viewer is invited into a series of varying spatial experiences to make their own observations of emotional expressions and to create connections between the works on display. Some works also encourage the visitor to reconsider human relationships to nature, and in particular to our closest animal relatives, the great apes.

Jeremy Deller, Matthew Killip and Richard Wiseman – Aping
The exhibition itself starts outside the gallery with an installation involving mirrors by Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with psychologist Richard Wiseman. Not only does the reflection employ the viewer as part of the installation, but the instructions – through image and word – to display certain behaviours make this a compelling installation. The installation includes a twist that gestures to practices of surveillance and observation of the chimp and human world alike.

Tina Gonsalves – Chameleon Prototype 06
Artist Tina Gonsalves collaborates with a team of scientists on creating this piece, which is one of 10 that comprise the The Chameleon Project. The project is a chronological progression of artwork prototypes merging art, neuroscience, and technology. Chameleon Prototype 06 is based on the observations and modelling of social interactions and how an individual can change the emotions within a group. Subtly changing expressions ripple across the faces of a number of individuals, like a chain of falling dominoes.

Diana Thater – gorillagorillagorilla
Diana Thater’s video installation is placed opposite a diagonal that cuts across the Jerwood Gallery. Thater’s silent moving image installation intervenes in and deconstructs the existing nineteenth century terracotta architecture. The viewer becomes part of the work, her or his shadow disturbing and contributing to the scaled narrative of the gorillas filmed in the rainforest of the Mefou Sanctuary in Cameroon. The installation creates a recurrent experience, allowing the spectator to revisit the moving imagery as he or she weaves in and out of the individual rooms. In Thater’s work, nature becomes larger and wider than we can fathom.

‘I create sculptures with images of nature in space,’ says Diana Thater, describing her monumental video installations that analyse complexities of the natural world, and their relationship with the human being.

This work was co-commissioned with Kunsthaus Graz, where it was displayed from January to May 2009.

Mark Haddon – 24 Emotions
The installation of 24 Emotions, a piece of literature by Mark Haddon, resembles a monumental zoetrope in which images and quotes from Darwin’s book are set against contemporary observations of social behaviour, described by Haddon. He carefully draws into focus the subtleties of emotional expression and sensation, and how Darwin grappled with describing and categorising emotional expressions.

Haddon explains, ‘I decided to create a fictional modern life and look at it through the lens of Darwin’s categories of emotions, one scene for each emotion, making a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces you can examine in turn, or carefully put back together.’

Bill Viola – I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like
The cinematic space for Bill Viola’s early video piece, commissioned in 1986 for television, acknowledges the framed cinematic experience – the viewer being physically outside the film, but brought into the narrative through observation and imagination.

The film weaves together subtle observations of wild and domestic animals, expanses of landscapes and human behaviour. It meditates on inner and outer states of mind and alludes to the connections between animals and humans. Life and death are constantly juxtaposed, decay forming a transition.

Ruth Padel – On Darwin and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
The trilogy of poems by Ruth Padel is presented within an octagonal space. The poems will be presented in a synchronised audio and visual display. Padel, great-great-granddaughter of Darwin, intrepidly ventured into a biographical engagement with the man, blurring the boundaries between him and the subjects of his observations.

Gautier Deblonde – Untitled
Gautier Deblonde’s photographs of the Natural History Museum’s zoology stores are presented in the same octagonal space as Ruth Padel’s poetry. Both works were brought together for this project.

A publication, Expressions: From Darwin to Contemporary Arts will accompany the exhibition. It features new writing by Swedish author Aris Fioretos, essays from Julia Voss, Jonah Lehrer and a response to Mark Haddon’s work by leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as well as information on all the works in the exhibition.

Diana Thater will be discussing her installation, gorillagorillagorilla, in a Nature Live event on
25 June at 14.30.

After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions is part of the Darwin200 celebrations, a nationwide series of events celebrating Darwin’s ideas and their impact around his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

For further information or images, please contact:
Jane Lucas, Natural History Museum Press Office
Tel: 020 7942 5189 Email: j.lucas@nhm.ac.uk

Notes for editors

• Selected by Time Out in 2007 as one of the Seven Wonders of London, the Natural History Museum is also a world-leading science research centre. Through its collections and scientific expertise, the Museum is helping to conserve the extraordinary richness and diversity of the natural world with groundbreaking projects in 68 countries.
Learn more at www.nhm.ac.uk

• For more information about other Darwin200 events, please visit www.darwin200.org

• The contemporary arts programme at the Natural History Museum is supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, enabling artists to develop and practise their ideas through access to the Museum’s scientists, collections and research. Outcomes from the Museum’s collaboration with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation include exhibitions such as Darwin’s Canopy, Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis and The Ship: The Art of Climate Change besides the current exhibition After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions and a forthcoming series of commissions. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is based in Lisbon with a UK branch in London. Its purpose in the UK and Ireland is to help enrich and connect the experiences of individuals and secure lasting and beneficial change.

• The exhibition was designed by London architects Carmody Groarke, who also designed the 7 July Memorial in Hyde Park, collaborated with Antony Gormley on the Blind Light pavilion at the Hayward Gallery and Carsten Holler on The Double Club, Islington.

• Diana Thater’s work, gorillagorillagorilla, is a co-commission by the Natural History Museum and Kunsthaus Graz and was created with the support of Bristol Zoo Gardens and the Mefou Sanctuary in Cameroon.

• Some of the poems written for After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions can be found in Ruth Padel’s new publication. Darwin: A Life in Poems is published by Chatto & Windus this year.

• The accompanying publication, Expressions: From Darwin to Contemporary Arts, was funded by the British Council.