Grant Museum taken over by artists for Sculpture Season

Sculpture Season at the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL opens this week. 13 emerging artists from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art have been invited to re-curate the Museum's spaces with their own sculptures, interpretations and installations. Sitting alongside the Museum's historic skeletons, skulls and specimens preserved in jars, the new works engage with animal/human encounters through re-animated flesh, tunnelling rats and mice, giant worms and body bags. The artists have responded to the physical spaces and specimens of the Museum, creating music technologies, phantom occupations of the Museum's iPad apps, hand-knitted internal organs and explorations of the excessive masculinity of giant deer antlers. Specimens have been re-ordered, re-labelled and reimagined. Founded in 1828 as a teaching collection, the Grant Museum is one of the world's oldest natural history collections and the Museum is packed full of skeletons, mounted animals and specimens preserved in fluid. Last month it was voted the winner of the Guardian Cultural Pros award - a search for the UK's most inspiring museum - at the Museum + Heritage Awards.