Why look at taxidermy animals? Exhibiting, curating and mourning the Sixth Mass Extinction Event

ABSTRACT

What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transforming the representational techniques employed by natural history curators? And what are the prevailing ideologies and emotional registers of contemporary exhibitions about anthropogenic extinctions? This essay answers these questions by analysing how recent natural history exhibitions communicate the Sixth Extinction through the affects of grief, loss and sadness. By unfolding a tripartite analysis, one which brings together natural history curatorial practices, theoretical critique from critical heritage studies and environmental humanities, and anti-institutional activism from groups such as Extinction Rebellion, I make the argument that while these exhibitions have the potential to develop posthumanist practices of curation that disrupt the dominant anthroponormativity of natural history, there remain unresolved questions surrounding their representational reliance on mourning.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural history
• critical heritage
• extinction
• posthumanism
• taxidermy

Acknowledgments

This essay benefited from critical and close readings by Mareike Vennen, Liz Stainforth, Lily Dessau and Stefan Skrimshire.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/S008284/1].

Notes on contributors

Dominic O’Key

Dominic O’Key is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. His current research explores the cultural meanings of the Sixth Extinction in museums, heritage, critical theory and contemporary literature. His writing has appeared in journals such as parallax (2019) and LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory (2020), and in books such as Animal Biography (Palgrave, 2018), Texts, Animals, Environments (Rombach, 2019) and Literature and Meat Since 1900 (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently writing a monograph about contemporary literature and human-animal relations, due for publication with Bloomsbury in 2021.