Displays of Power: A Natural History of Empire is a new temporary exhibition at the Grant Museum of Zoology, part of UCL Culture at University College London.
 
The exhibition, which runs until March 2020, explores the history of science and empire, and aims to put into practice the theory outlined by myself and Miranda Lowe, the principal curator at the Natural History Museum in London, in a 2018 paper entitled Nature read in black and white: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections.
In the paper, we describe how natural history museums in the UK perpetuate systemic racism by ignoring the history of how zoology specimens came to be in museum collections in the first place. We argue that this erases a history of how scientific approaches of Enlightenment and imperial Europe were tools of empire as were natural history museums themselves.
To remedy this erasure, Displays of Power puts the history of empire back into the museum display.
Keeping the original display intact, we have written new labels for a selection of animal specimens in the Grant Museum. The new labels are based on research into the provenance of these objects, and through them we bring the colonial context in which this collection was formed and used to the fore.
What can the platypus skeleton sent to Robert Edmond Grant, UCL’s founding professor of zoology and comparative anatomy, or the orangutan who lived at London Zoo, tell us about the interplay between academic and colonial networks?
What connects the extinction of the thylacine to the genocide of local people in colonial Tasmania? How do the animals on display reflect the spread of the British Empire?
The exhibition also considers the legacy of colonial collecting practices and scientific paradigms on how we view natural history collections at the Grant Museum, and other natural history museums, and how these collections can be used now and in the future.
The exhibition also includes a public programme of events designed to interrogate and pervert power in engaging ways. For example, we are working with local communities in Camden and Bloomsbury to take over interpretation of the museum.
The goal is to give visitors the information and a critical frame for when they next encounter a natural history collection – and to encourage them to think about museums more critically as a whole.
The method for telling and engaging audiences with this decolonial story is grounded in traditional museum practice. While the research is specific to the Grant Museum, the same techniques and revisionist approach could be used by any museum looking to redress the balance of their colonial history.

Subhadra Das is the curator science collections at UCL