nanoq: flat out and bluesome [Spitzbergen exhibition]

Photographic installation held at Svalbard Museum, Longyearbyen, Spitzbergen, 2010-2011.

This collection of thirty works was generated by the artists Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, from a survey of stuffed polar bears in the UK. Each work combines the image of a taxidermic polar bear with a text describing, in tabled form, its provenance – typically including information such as where it was shot or captured, when and by whom, and the nature of the expedition. The project sets out to challenge the human view of non-human animals as “the other”, a view that seems inevitably and destructively to sanction inequality and loss.