Situated in Talbot Rice Gallery’s former natural history museum, Candice Lin’s exhibition will open speculative conversations about how humanness, animality, race and gender have been shaped by histories of science. A new animation on a kinetic screen will feature cats—including Roger, the artist’s cat—who philosophically theorizes about the role of animal castration in the human world. Tracing an alternate genealogy of sexual knowledge drawn from queer historians and theorists, Lin examines the porous boundaries and violent intimacies that define the non-human.
Lin also directly addresses examples from the prominent history of medicine in Scotland. Her work, The Moon/Inside Out, directly addresses William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus, a study by the founder of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow that notoriously involved the murder of pregnant women. Examining how colonial, capitalist and scientific projects construct the human through constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to non-human animals, this exhibition provides a queer, imaginative space in which new sensibilities can form.
at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
until September 29, 2024