Exhibition highlights
How do we and animals express emotions? What are the similarities between our expressions?
Explore some highlights of the 7 artists' work at After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions. They shed new light on these fascinating questions in their response to Charles Darwin's original observations.
Download a copy of the Exhibition leaflet PDF (886.0 KB)
A book accompanies the exhibition, Exoressions: From Darwin to Contemporary Arts, and is on sale in the exhibition shop. Or buy the exhibition book online
Mark Haddon: 24 Emotions (short fiction, new commission, 2009). From Love to Hate, the spectrum of emotions revealed in Mark Haddon's literary artwork follows Charles Darwin's original list of 24 emotional states. Each emotion is featured in an installation of 24 wall panels. On these, Haddon playfully splices photographs and quotes from Darwin's own text with evocative modern scenes.
Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with Richard Wiseman: Aping (installation, new commission, 2009). Have fun with this installation at the exhibition entrance. It echoes lab work on ape and monkey intelligence. There's a surprising twist that gestures to practices of surveillance and observation, of both the chimp and human world.
Tina Gonsalves: Chameleon Prototype 06 (video installation, part of the Chameleon Project 2008-2010). See how we infect each other with emotions in Gonsalves intriguing piece using computer modelling. It is part of the artist's ongoing Chameleon Project to create a database of contemporary facial expressions through 10 prototypes merging art, neuroscience and technology.
Bill Viola: I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (video, 89 minutes, 1986). Be drawn into this emotive film which investigates inner human states and connections to animal consciousness. It is shown in 5 parts. Viola and his wife gathered images over 5 years, observing animals and rituals across different Canadian and American terrains. Warning: Some of the rituals shown may be disturbing. Film times each day: 10.15-11.45, 12.00-13.30, 13.45-15.15, 15.30-17.00.
Diana Thater: gorillagorillagorilla (video installation, new commission, 2009). Immerse yourself in the gorillas projected on the exhibition space. Observe their individuality and engage with their beauty. Thater uses film to prompt reflection on our place in nature. The gorillas are all survivors of the illegal bushmeat trade in Cameroon.
Ruth Padel: On Darwin and the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (fifteen poems, new commission, 2009). Ruth Padel is Charles Darwin's great great granddaughter. Reflect on Darwin's own emotions through Padel's moving poems, presented on screen and recited. She captures Darwin's emotional responses to his mother's death when he was 8 and to his boyhood passions for collecting and nature, and beyond to the present.
Gautier Deblonde: Untitled (C41 prints, 2007).These photographs were taken in the Natural History Museum's zoology store in south London. The static specimens might be our only experience of certain species, but their stuffed forms tell us about the collectors and hunters too.
Expressions: From Darwin to Contemporary Arts edited by Bergit Arends. This book accompanies the exhibition and presents the exhibition pieces with specially commissioned texts by Antonio Damasio, Aris Fioretos, Mark Haddon, Ruth Padel, Julia Voss and Bridget M. Waller. £12.99, 116 pages, 23 x 16 cm, full-colour, paperback.
Buy the exhibition book online
As you enter the exhibition, browse some virtual pages of Charles Darwin's original The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals. His book was the starting point for the exhibition. In it, Darwin examined the continuity of emotional states of animals and humans. It took him more than 30 years to write and was published in 1872.
Buy The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals book online
