A beautiful, enigmatic and sometimes sad exhibition has been making the rounds of museums and other exhibition spaces, featuring photographs of mounted polar bears found around the United Kingdom. The original exhibition, in Spike Island in Bristol, featured the mounted bears themsleves and there is also a large and well-produces book on the project.

The artists  Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson are a collaborative, Icelandic/UK art practice comprising Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson. The artists have been working together for five years. Their most recent projects have taken ‘animal absences’ and their representation through taxidermy, myth and domestic dwelling as starting points from which to reappraise our own assumptions of history, culture, environment and of nature.

Five years in the making, the project "nanoq: flat out and bluesome" set out initially to track down all polar bears currently in the UK, originally brought to this country on the back of a wealth of 19th and 20th century initiatives from whaling, arctic exploration, mapping and even rescue, to pure aristocratic adventuring in a colonial tradition typical of the time. Bryndís and Mark photographed the specimens in their settings, in storage, undergoing restoration or in pride of place in museum collections and private homes and estates. They researched the histories of each polar bear and wherever possible identified the date, place and the individual associated with its death or capture. Then in 2004 in Spike Island in Bristol they mounted an installation of ten of these specimens, with all museum context and history removed. The displacement of the bears from their notable position within each collection and their reconfiguration within a temporary grouping, stripped of interpretation, allowed an unprecedented mass of these strikingly imposing and charismatic creatures to work on the imaginations of one of the largest audiences ever to pass through this venue.

The photographic exhibitions – ursa major, hvide björn, great white bear - feature the photographic archive from this project which has been exhibited in part or as a whole in museums and galleries in the UK and abroad.  Last summer photographic images from the project were shown in Askja, the House of natural Sciences at the University of Iceland and are currently on show in Bryggen, North Atlantic House in Copenhagen until 19th of February 2007.  The archive, which consists of 32 images and text works will be shown together for the first time in the Horniman Museum in London from 21st of October to 25th 2006 of March 2007.  the book – nanoq: flat out and bluesome, A Cultural Life of Polar Bears  The book published by Black Dog, London has just been launched and is a lavishly illustrated account on the work of Bryndís and Mark on this project, charting the uneasy relationship between the wild and its depiction in museums and galleries. A historical and artistic account, the book discloses the process of the survey and the subsequent installation of ten of the bears in a converted tea-packing factory. It includes essays by leading academics Michelle Henning, Dr Garry Marvin and Dr Steve Baker, who write about taxidermy and photography, trophy-hunting and the depiction of animals in contemporary art, alongside previously unpublished archival photographs of 19th Century bear hunting in the Arctic. The complete artists’ photographic survey is reproduced in full colour. nanoq: is a unique and haunting book, which examines the relationship of humans to nature by pulling focus on this most charismatic and enigmatic of creatures.