Speculative Taxidermy

Giovanni Aloi (PhD, Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London) is Lecturer in Visual Culture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Art and Animals (I.B. Tauris, 2011) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. His new book Speculative Taxidermy: Biopolitics in the Anthropocene is forthcoming from Columbia.Giovanni Aloi is a lecturer in art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York and London, and Tate Galleries. He is the author of Art and Animals (2011) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Hannah Stark, University of Tasmania:
Speculative Taxidermy makes a fascinating contribution to the nonhuman turn and invites us to find new ways to envisage the relationships between human and nonhuman animals. It will be a significant text for ethical and political debates in animal studies and the environmental humanities.

Susan McHugh, author of Animal Stories and Dog:
How did taxidermy become cool again? The recent and rapid rise of taxidermy in contemporary art reflects a broader shift in philosophical understandings of animals as embodiments of our shared physical vulnerability. Reading key examples through art and natural history, Speculative Taxidermy makes the case that aesthetic innovation follows from a sense of materiality as imposing a heightened register of realism, and with sweeping consequences for human-animal relations.