Favorite show of the year so far

Address: 144-152 Bermondsey St, London SE1 3TQ
Exhibition time: 4.5-5.14 | 2023

From fungi and beehives to buds and corals, Marguerite Humeau presents a multisensory world with sound, image and sculpture.

The list of various creatures, insects, Marine creatures and extinct species specimens, fossils, biological slices, etc., is super suitable for archaeology, creatures, fossils or rare rare species lovers to visit. Even if the museum area is not large, but a variety of exhibits are displayed very compact, a lot of collections. You can watch for about 2 hours (need to watch carefully), and enter for free.

Marguerite Humeau (born 1986 in France) lives and works in London. She received her Master's degree from the Royal College of Art in London in 2011. For her, each installation is a small ecosystem, and she always conceives each exhibition as one huge piece of work.

In past exhibitions, she has revived prehistoric creatures, communicated with aliens, and revived the extinct languages of Cleopatra, which seem at odds with today's reality, but serve as a scientific reminder of the importance of going back to the roots.、

Her work has had a solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2021); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2020); Hamburg Art Association (2019); Museum, Bolzano (2019); The New Museum of New York (2018); Tate Britain, London (2017) and other solo exhibitions.

His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including the 59th Venice Biennale "Milk of Dreams" (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Palace of Versailles, France (2017); Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); And the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Gallery, London (2014), among others.

Her complex and tactile sculptures revolve around narratives of human and insect society, posing and balancing in the gallery's softly lit rooms, as if we were entering a bizarre insect society's hive.

In some sculptures, the gills and honeycomb structures of mushrooms are reproduced in materials such as bronze, hand-blown glass, natural beeswax and wood eaten by forest creatures, and her sculptures are accompanied by the sound of cyclic breathing, sometimes interrupted by the reverberations of tapping.

The artist is inspired by social insects such as ants, termites and bees, whose complex cooperative societies allow them to build huge structures and nurture other organisms in symbiotic relationships.

Reflecting on ants herding aphids and termites tending their fungal gardens, the artist finds that yeast occupies an equivalent position in human society, as the basic ingredient of bread and beer, to which our human collectives have come together.

Considering the imminent, self-inflicted possibility of extinction that we face as a species, the artist sees the insect society as both a inheritor of our destroyed environment and a reminder to consider how interdependence and cooperation can provide a means of avoiding our fate.