I finally got the chance to go and visit the Nottingham Contemporary earlier this week and saw the latest exhibition 'FOXP2' by Marguerite Humeau. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting I found it. It was quite empty when we went so we were lucky enough to have a lovely lady who talked us through the exhibition and explained what it was all about. The exhibition was based around a mutation of a gene called FOXP2. This is the crucial 2% difference in our DNA between us humans and other animals such as chimpanzees. 98% of human and chimpanzee DNA is actually the same which I didn't know!
When we first entered the exhibition we were standing in a pitch black walkway with very strange sounds playing in our ears! I was a bit confused as to what was going on initially until I learnt more about it. It was essentially a synthetic voice beatboxing the origins of language, joined by 108 billion homo sapiens. This was probably my least favourite part of the exhibition as it was a little bit spooky and slightly bizarre.
The rest of the exhibition was much brighter and covered in my favourite blush pink colour- definitely one of the prettiest exhibitions I've ever seen! I really liked the story and meanings behind the work in this room. All of the elephant sculptures were all facing the matriarch elephant 'Echo' who was slowly passing away. Each sculpture/elephant were reacting to this through different ways and emotions. For example 'Felicie' was a female elephant engineered to be self-destructive by getting drunk. Elephants actually get drunk with ethanol that comes from masala fruit- I found this so bizarre! The way it was shown was probably my favourite part of the exhibition as parts of ethanol were dropped into the water pump, this was pumping over and over whilst sounds were being played that the elephants would have made. I thought this was a really unique and clever way to show the different emotions. Another example of this is the elephant 'Enid' who was engineered to cry out of sadness. The mixture in this had depressant hormones mixed with three real drops of elephant tears which were sourced from a Thai zoo.
Another really interesting part of the whole exhibition was the beautifully coloured carpet itself. The pink carpet was dyed with pigments created from chemical components of the human body. Overall, I really enjoyed finding out about this exhibition and having a tour guide really helped us understand what was actually going on! I would 100% recommend checking it out if you're ever in Nottingham.
Thankyou for reading,
Love from Georgia
xxx
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