This Is Not To Be Looked At; Highlights of the Permanent Collection

The permanent collection of the natural history museum is a hidden world, the backstage area of the museum. It is here that the bulk of the collection is stored and maintained, the majority of pieces never leaving the dark back room spaces for the glossy front-stage of the museum floor. These spaces are forgotten and unnoticed by most museum visitors, hidden away behind large oak panel doors, and beyond windy staircases, in roofs and cellars, storage containers and dusty back rooms.

In the spaces behind the scenes the barrier between the viewer and the viewed is broken down, the objects no longer form part of an elaborate fiction into which we can become immersed. These spaces are rich with tensions and contradictions, modernity and tradition, natural and- artificial, reality and fiction.



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