Image: Diana Thater, gorillagorillagorilla, (2009) Production Still 

Jeremy Deller | Ruth Padel | Diana Thater
After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions

Opens 26 June
Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 5BD

Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, the poet Ruth Padel, are two of four artists and writers who have created new works for the Natural History Museum’s summer arts exhibition After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions.

The exhibition will feature new film and installation commissions from Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with Professor Richard Wiseman and Diana Thater, alongside existing video work by Bill Viola. New literature, commissioned from award winning authors Mark Haddon and Ruth Padel, will also form part of the exhibition.

The artists were asked to explore Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,in which he examines the continuity of emotional states of animals and humans.

The resulting works investigate today’s cultural perspectives on human-animal kinship, the study of emotional expressions and offer a contemporary take on Darwin’s challenge to the place humans occupy in nature.The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the earliest publications to make use of photography for illustration and scientific evidence, and was hugely popular in its day. With reference to observations of animals in London Zoo, his own children and research into facial muscles by French physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, Darwin examined emotions on the basis of evolution. It was these thoughts that sparked more widespread research into human and animal emotions.

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 António Damásio as well as information on all the works in the exhibition.