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Dead or Alive: Birds in our World
This online exhibition from Manchester Museum celebrates the overlooked and untidy, the ragged and unappealing bird skins that languish forgotten in museum drawers. It commemorates eight individual birds who lived in the nineteenth century and were caught up in the machinations of empire.
What meaning is carried in the afterlives of these bird bodies that have been passed down through the generations? That’s a question our Greater Manchester artists answered in compelling and beautiful ways. Manchester Museum invited twenty young artists from the region to create artistic interpretations of the bird specimens in a range of different media, from poetry and embroidery to film and music.
As they grappled with questions of colonial inheritance, human-animal relations, and displacement, they explored themes of human migration, loss, memory, familial connections across different countries, and their artworks show how the lives of birds and humans are emotionally entangled.
We’d like to invite you to read the pamphlet of poems by Charlotte Wetton, the project’s resident poet who spent time working with the bird specimens. Among the twenty artists, three others were also Squad writers: Tadgh Gibson responded with a poem and a sculpture of the Hadada Ibis bird made with found objects, Elizabeth Gibson responded with a poem, and Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith with a painting.
The entire online exhibition can be explored on the link below until the 31st of December 2027.