Interspecies collisions (blog)

07/09/2008

Nicolas Primat with squirrel monkeys, Guyana

Work has started on The Arts Catalyst's latest touring exhibition: 'Interspecies - artists collaborating with animals'. Touring the UK in 2009, funded by an Arts Council England Grant For the Arts, it will be part of the celebrations commemorating 200 years since Darwin's birth and 150 years since he wrote On The Origin of Species. Artists planned to make new projects are Nicolas Primat (pictured above), Kira O'Reilly, Antony Hall and Ruth Maclennan, with existing works planned to be shown by Beatriz Da Costa (PigeonBlog) Rachel Mayeri (Primate Cinema) and Kathy High (Embracing Animal). The show opens at Cornerhouse, Manchester and tours the UK before arriving at the former Museum of Mankind (now part of the Royal Academy) London. 

To research the exhibition I travelled with Nicolas Primat, the French artist who has worked for many years with groups of monkeys (his name really is 'Primat'), to the bi-annual Congress of the International Primatalogical Society, where I discovered many new issues around the relations between human and non-human primates, which will inform debates around our Interspecies exhibition.

This week the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is switched on, following the most public debate the world of high energy physics has seen for a long time. It will not start colliding particles until next month, so we will have to wait a little to see if the planet, or at least Geneva is eaten by a black hole. Assurances about the safety of the experiment can be found here and the doomsday merchants home is to be found here. Make up your own minds about the arguments...

Rob La Frenais, Curator