10 Unmissable Highlights from More than Human

On display are a series of baskets woven by weavers from the Ye'kuana people of the Venezuelan Amazon. The Ye'kuana consider weaving to be one of the essential facets of their culture, it's a deeply cultural activity. In addition, the way that they extract their reeds and vines for the baskets is very special. They journey into the forest, and through highly ritualised processes, through singing songs, they ask the forest for permission to extract the materials to weave their baskets.

These baskets aren’t cultural artefacts, in the way that we might see them. Rather, they are essentially still considered to be nature, an extension of the forest. For the Ye’kuana, everything in the forest is animate or is alive or has its own spirit. And that's why they ask for permission to take the materials.

2020–23

This large-scale mural emerged from one of the four fellowships that were awarded to research-based practices to create a new work for the exhibition. It was produced by The More than Human Life (MOTH) Program, led by César Rodriguez Garavito, professor of law at NYU.

The mural tells the story of the living world, one in which all of nature is alive, specifically by showing how rivers should be considered as living beings and legal subjects. There are many examples of rivers that have been awarded these rights in Colombia, Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Peru, and this work names them and gives excerpts of court rulings protecting their integrity.

2025

The Transspecies Rosette by the architect Andrés Jaque is effectively a piece of façade. Imagine it as the surface of a building, made of cork. It's a soft material, and it's specifically designed so that other species can inhabit it. It's a host for mosses and grasses and bacteria and mould and living things.

Normally, when we design a building, the facade is conceived as a barrier. It keeps life and weather out. They're barriers against the outside world, but there's no reason why the skin of a building can't also be more hospitable to other species. If the surface of a building becomes more porous and allows life to take root within it, you can imagine cities in the future being much more hospitable to natural life and increasing that sense of a relationship that we have with the living world.

2025

In the heart of the exhibition is a partial reconstruction of a pavilion designed by the Finnish architect duo, Suomi/Koivisto. The original structure housed many different species from plants that were surrounding the structure to the clay that was applied to the surface of the bricks, which formed housing for insects, to the plant species that were selected particularly for their properties in supporting insect life. And it also became a space in which humans could gather and learn and research about a kind of interchange that could potentially happen between architecture and other species.

It seems like a room that's built specifically for humans, but it’s made up of mass-produced bricks that have been turned on their sides, so that the design of the brick, which is intended for human comfort as insulation in buildings, also then becomes a kind of insect house. It's a ready-made space for pollinators to create their homes and shelter from the weather.

2025

This table and two stools are designed by a Belgian design studio called Bento Architecture. They work with mycelium, the root-like part of fungi, to create furniture, among other things.

To ‘grow’ these objects, they incubated this live organism together with waste from the table's wooden base. The tabletop then solidified into its current form. The same method was applied to create the two stools. The mycelium is now dormant, hence the title of the work, Accalmie, which translates to lull or calm. It’s a great example of how designers can effectively co-create with other living organisms, therefore giving up some of our agency in that creative process. This marks an important shift in design practice.

2023–24

Japanese artist Shimabuku has long made works with octopuses in mind. For this project, he made an offering or a gift to this highly intelligent creature. Noticing how they pick up stones and seashells on the ocean floor, he created glass balls in different colours and sizes for them to play with.

He then took photographs of an octopus playing with these balls, and as the title suggests, to see how they explored for their favourite colours. Ultimately, this is a beautiful example of how artists can honour other forms of intelligence and enjoyment beyond our own.

2010

We have included in the last section of the exhibition reproductions of a large drawing and a series of pages from a booklet produced by the architecture and media collective Ant Farm in the mid-1970's. What they depict is a radical and almost utopian project, the development of a floating research station for communication with dolphins. It's called the Dolphin Embassy, and even in the name is implicit the idea that other species deserve their own embassies or their own means of communicating with us, which of course is impossible, which is why it's a utopian project.

1974–77

This eight-metre long tapestry is called Pollinator Pathmaker: Perceptual Field, and it was made by the artist, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. It's the latest development in a series of explorations and projects that have come about as the result of a commission that Ginsberg received in 2021 from the Eden Project in Cornwall. That commission was to create an artwork for pollinators, and Daisy's response was to build an algorithm that could design gardens without human intervention. She created a set of parameters that the algorithm would choose from and which would provide the best source of nutrition, the best habitats, and the best planting methods so that it would be easiest for certain pollinators to move through a garden and locate their source of food for the day.

That planting scheme in Cornwall evolved into subsequent gardens, and as she has been researching over the course of the last four or five years, Ginsberg really thought a lot about the perception and the experience of these planted artworks from the point of view of a pollinator: the tapestry has been scaled up so that you are now the size of a pollinator encountering a planted garden. The other unusual aspect of this tapestry is that Ginsberg has allowed for a speculative understanding of how a pollinator might see the colours of these plants, because of course, pollinator vision is very different from human vision.

2025

'Seahorse’ is one of four brilliant short films shown in the exhibition that were conceived, written by and star Isabella Rossellini, who holds a Masters degree in animal behaviour. Her fascination for the extraordinary lives of the insects, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals whom we live amongst is communicated with humour and often a little shock. It seems that human mating habits are mundane in comparison!

The biggest challenge for anyone encountering the themes and ideas that this show addresses is how to begin to have empathy for other species. How can we think of ourselves in relation to such different bodies and experiences of the world? Rossellini’s response to this urgent need to care and conserve is to dress as those species, act as them, and in so doing, impart knowledge that we might never forget. 

2010

Kelp Council is an installation featuring a soundscape by Lohmann and Finnish composer Ville Raasakka. Lohmann started working with seaweed over a decade ago, having discovered it as a more regenerative and positive material which could help its environment as it grows.

This installation is somewhat mysterious; the question really to you as the visitor is how much do you want to engage with this group of beings? Do you want to stay on the outside of the circle and observe them, try and understand their materiality? Do you want to enter into the centre of the group and listen to their landscape and the soundscape that they are normally growing in and through?

Lohmann is keen for us to engage with the entire ecosystem in which materials originate; if we are to use materials that are comparatively better for the planet than those we have become familiar with in the last century, we also need to consider their needs and their presence in the world.

2025