Rewilding the Museum
CApE talk by Dehlia Hannah.
Rewilding the Museum examines how artists and curators are navigating, resisting, and reshaping exhibition infrastructures to articulate new understandings of nature. Museums are anything but wild. Historically, art museums have functioned as key sites for the production of boundaries between nature and culture. Nature might be presented in form and image, but its processes must not be allowed to take hold within the museum’s architecture itself. Contesting such norms, artists have chopped through walls, filled galleries with dirt and brought plants, animals, insects and fungi inside. Other leave the the museum behind altogether to embrace the specificity of sites. At the same time, floods, fires and power failures—rendered increasingly frequent by a changing climate—threaten collections and controlled indoor climates. The museum presents a microcosm of environmental crisis and site for remediation. Rewilding the Museum engages the central paradox of restoration ecology: nature cannot be recovered as a past ideal, but must be reimagined as a dynamic system. In anticipation of the forthcoming book (Hatje Cantz, 2026), this talk presents key findings from a five year research and curatorial project hosted by Ny Carlsberg Foundation, Arken, and CApE. What would it mean to align the representation of nature with the condition of art’s exhibition, conservation and critique? How are new visions of nature emerging within and against the constraints of museum infrastructures ?
Bio
Dehlia Hannah is a curator and philosopher of nature, presently Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In 2025 she is a fellow of the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE). She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specializations in aesthetics and the philosophy of science. Her research and curatorial practice focuses on contemporary artistic engagements with emerging science and technology and cultural responses to environmental crisis. She is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021) with Rogers et al., Julian Charrière—Toward No Earthly Pole, (Mousse, 2020), A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2019) and Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (Milwaukee, 2015) with Sarah Krajewski, among other books and catalogues. Her forthcoming monograph Rewilding the Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2026) considers the museum as a site of restoration ecology and cultural transformation of ideas of nature.