, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, from 25 May to 30 September
THE kids will love it, of course. Still, there is something very slightly creepy about Turner Contemporary’s first crowdfunding venture. Assuming the gallery can get the cash together –and we still have until 15 May to put our money where our imagination is – it will be letting a polar bear loose to wander the seaside town of Margate, UK.
Although Paula’s 20-day visit is scheduled for the height of summer, she (and we) will be perfectly safe, because Paula isn’t a real polar bear. She is in fact a life-size puppet, on loan from Greenpeace.
Advertisement
The organisation has been transporting her everywhere from Washington DC to Finland and New Zealand to encourage public conversations about climate change. What better symbol could there be? Having lost much of their sea-ice habitat to climate change, in May 2008 polar bears were listed as a threatened species in the US under the Endangered Species Act.
Paula is a witty and charming provocation, but her appearance as part of Turner Contemporary’s summer show Animals & Us raises darker questions. Will Paula’s artfully choreographed presence among Margate’s beach crowds remind us of the extinction event even now gathering about her species? Or will she simply serve to distract?
“Us moderns must travel a great imaginative distance to connect with other species”
After all, teddy bears are one thing, but what does it mean to puppeteer a friendly bear that’s physically virtually indistinguishable from its fierce, predatory original? And as species after species disappears, will we come to accept puppets in their stead, in some ghastly real-world retread of the original Blade Runner?
Animals & Us promises to pose difficult questions like these in a range of playful and charming ways as it explores the relationship between animals, artists and other varieties of human. Historical objects, from Egyptian artefacts to a medieval Christian bestiary, provide context, but it is the contemporary and 20th-century art that takes centre stage.
In prehistoric times, humans distinguished themselves from the animals around them by depicting them as prey, as spirits, even as gods. Contemporary works by Laura Ford and Raqib Shaw reflect this patrimony, playing with anthropomorphism, myth, fable and human-animal hybrids.
But the bald fact is, us moderns must travel a great imaginative distance to connect with other species. There is a chilling, elegiac quality to Mishka Henner’s aerial photographs of Texan cattle feedlots, and also to Candida Höfer’s photographic series Zoologischer Garten that shows zoo animals in their artificial environments.
With the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, and with 38 per cent of all known species on the verge of extinction, Animals & Us is bound to offer a timely and not altogether comfortable re-examination of how we coexist and connect with other living species – or rather, how we fail to.
Coming up
Our picks of what’s on show
11 May to 13 January 2019
At Cooper Hewitt In New York (the only dedicated design museum in the US), explores the elusive, complex phenomenon of colour perception.
From 12 May
(at London’s V&A, that is) with 100 objects that seem straight out of science fiction, though they are all real enough, produced by research labs, universities, designers’ studios, governments and corporations.
17 May to 16 September
“All the better to eat you with, my dear…” Vampires, tooth fairies, barber-surgeons and dentists make an appearance at , the Wellcome Collection’s summer exhibition in London.
24 May to 11 November
Charles Dickens: Man of Science at London’s promises to reveal the author’s friendships and links with Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, Florence Nightingale and more.
22 June to 30 September
How do living things survive in outer space, on the bottom of the ocean or inside volcanoes? And how might humans emulate them? Life at the Edges poses some extreme questions at .
2 to 8 July
Their full programme has yet to be released, but expect a free, week-long festival celebrating the cutting edge of UK science at the Royal Society’s in London.
6 & 7 July
in London promises alternative visions and bold solutions to this era’s big challenges. Four years in, and they haven’t solved them yet? Must try harder!
This article appeared in print under the headline “Working the crowds”
