Art

Amazing Rare Things
Sir David Attenborough - The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery
Queen's Gallery -Buckingham Palace

14 March - 28 September 2008

This extraordinary exhibition has been selected from the collections of the Royal Library in collaboration with the distinguished naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough. It brings together the works of four artists and a collector who have shaped our knowledge of the world around us. Leonardo da Vinci, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby are diverse figures who shared a passion for enquiry and a fascination with the beautiful and bizarre in nature. All lived at a time when new species were being discovered around the world in ever increasing numbers. Many of the plants and animals represented in the exhibition were then barely known in Europe. Today some are commonplace, while others are extinct.

Explore selected works from the exhibition with Sir David Attenborough online

See Sir Attenborough discussing the exhibition

Conferences and Talks

The Animal Gaze
20 and 21 November 2008

Symposium: The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art & Animal/Human Studies

London Metropolitan University (City Campus), Whitechapel, London, U.K.
Thursday 20 and Friday 21 November 2008

Keynote Speakers: Steve Baker, Dario Martinelli, Marcus Coates

The representation of animals in contemporary art has shifted into new
modes over the last 10 years, as animals come to bear different meanings
in Western culture. The aim of 'The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art &
Animal/Human Studies' is to address such changes - to exhibit recent art
about animals, as well as to discuss it.

'The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art & Animal/Human Studies' is a two day
symposium in London, seeking to outline those theoretical and practical
meeting-points where contemporary art encounters animals. Scholars and
authors from both inside and outside the art world (such as Steve Baker
and Dario Martinelli) will assess how such art around animals might be
redefined. Artists currently working in this area, such as Marcus Coates
and Snaesbjornsdottir/Wilson, will be interviewed about their practice. UK
conservation and animal welfare organisations will outline actual
scenarios for project workshops.

Part of Steve Baker's argument in his keynote presentation will be that
artists are prepared to admit to not knowing exactly what they are doing
alongside animals, or indeed what their audience will do. Such latitude
has an unusual status in animal/human studies, so that issues around
animals and humans acquire in contemporary art a foreground and immediacy,
to provoke intense and useful debate among artists and scholars.

Alongside the symposium is a contemporary art exhibition, featuring over
40 artists. This group show looks beyond those representations of animals
that regularly appear elsewhere in the visual culture of our own species.
Instead, a neat admixture of less common stances towards animals will be
on display, particularly in video and sound, photography and installation.

For more information about speakers, presentation abstracts and artists at
'The Animal Gaze', including delegate bookings (limited to 90 places
only), please see: http://www.animalgaze.org.

The Animals and Society (Australia)
Study Group
and
The University of Newcastle
present

The 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society:
Minding Animals

The University of Newcastle and the Animals and Society (Australia) Study
Group present the Minding Animals Conference to be held in Newcastle,
Australia, between 13 and 19 July, 2009. The conference will bring together
a broad range of academic disciplines and representatives from universities,
non-government organisations and the community, industry and government from around the world. Conference delegates will examine the interrelationships between human and nonhuman animals from cultural, historical, geographical, environmental, moral, legal and political perspectives. The conference will have six major themes and objectives:

• To reassess the relationship between the animal and environmental
movements in light of climate change and other jointly-held threats and
concerns

• To examine how humans identify and represent nonhuman animals in art,
literature, music, science, and in the media and on film

• How, throughout history, the objectification of nonhuman animals and
nature in science and society, religion and philosophy, has led to the abuse
of nonhuman animals and how this has since been interpreted and evaluated

• To examine how the lives of humans and companion and domesticated
nonhuman animals are intertwined, and how science, human and veterinary
medicine utilize these important connections

• How the study of animals and society can better inform both the
scientific study of animals and community activism and advocacy

• And how science and community activism and advocacy can inform the study
of nonhuman animals and society

Speakers include: Carol Adams, Marc Bekoff, J.Baird Callicott, JM Coetzee,
Dale Jamieson, Val Plumwood, Bernard Rollin, Michael Soulé, Andrew Rowan,
James Serpell, Peter Singer, Paul Waldau and Jennifer Wolch.

For further information, please go to the conference website:
http://www.mindinganimals.com

And if you have any queries regarding the conference, please send us an e-mail
to: mindinganimals@pco.com.au