British Museum forthcoming exhibitions 2008
Please note that exhibition titles and dates are subject to
change and should be checked before going to press.
Major new exhibitions for 2008
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict
24 July – 26 October 2008
Admission charge, sponsored by BP
Reading Room
Hadrian, emperor of Rome from AD 117 to AD 138, is best known
for his interest in architecture, his passion for Greece and Greek
culture and of course the eponymous wall he built between England
and Scotland.
This exhibition will look beyond his established image and offer
new perspectives on his life and rule, exploring the sharp
contradictions of his personality and his role as a ruthless
military commander. Set against the backdrop of the events of his
21-year reign, the exhibition will explore his immense legacy,
incorporating recent scholarship and the latest archaeological
discoveries from Tivoli, his spectacular villa near Rome.
Based upon highly important loan material seen together for the
first time, the exhibition will examine Hadrian’s background as a
member of the economically powerful and ascendant Spanish elite,
his relationship with his lover Antinous, his military campaigns,
the iconic architecture of his time, his extensive travels, his
succession and impact and influence on the modern world.
This will be the second exhibition held in the Round Reading
Room, the dome of which has been compared to the Pantheon in Rome,
one of Hadrian’s architectural masterpieces.
The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock
10 April – 7 September 2008
Admission free, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art
and American Airlines
Room 90
The first half of the 20th century in America was a period of
great change. This exhibition examines society and culture as
viewed through the prints produced by some of the most important
artists of the time.
The exhibition begins with John Sloan's Ashcan School etchings
of everyday urban experience in the 1900s and concludes with
Jackson Pollock and the triumph of abstract expressionism in the
1950s. Prints by Blanche Lazzell, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery,
Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Josef Albers, David Smith and
Joan Mitchell are among the 150 or so works featured to show the
principal themes and episodes in American printmaking during this
period.
This exhibition will travel to four venues across the UK after
its closure at the British Museum in September 2008.
Babylon
13 November 2008 – 15 March 2009
Admission charge
Room 35
The city of Babylon, situated in modern-day Iraq, has engendered
the richest legacy in art and thought from great paintings to
contemporary film and music. The exhibition will bring together
such works of imagination with archaeological treasures from
ancient Babylon, to reveal the reality behind the legends.
The exhibition will focus on the period of Nebuchadnezzar
(reigned 604 – 562 BC) bringing his capital to life through
bombastic inscriptions on stone and clay, objects of cultic and
daily life, magnificent enamel wall panels, and a
newly-commissioned model of the architecture that made the city so
famous. It will also examine the stories that have sprung from the
city including the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens,
Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, the Babylonian Captivity and the city’s
infamous Fall. The exhibition concludes with consideration of the
city’s tragic recent history through video and photography.
The exhibition is organised by the British Museum, the Musée du
Louvre and the Réunion des musées nationaux Paris and the Stiftung
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
Other exhibitions
Fascination with Nature
10 January – 5 August 2008
Admission free
Room 91
Coinciding with Chinese New Year and following the phenomenal
success of the Museum’s The First
Emperor exhibition, this is the third in a series of
annual themed displays focusing on the British Museum's permanent
collection of Chinese paintings. Fascination with
Nature will feature around 40 paintings of birds,
flowers, plants and insects alongside a selection of porcelains
decorated with images from nature. A highlight of the exhibition
will be a 14th century handscroll titled Fascination of
Nature by Xie Chufang, acquired in 1998 with the help of the
Art Fund.
Icons of Revolution: Mao badges then and now
A coins and medals display
10 April – 14 September 2008
Admission free
Room 69a
China has changed enormously since Mao's death in 1976, but what
has become of the revolutionary iconography of his Cultural
Revolution?
This exhibition will explain some of the highly charged images
on Chairman Mao badges and other relics of that time, and show how
they have evolved over the last forty years. Some have survived,
often in unexpected ways, and others have been replaced by newer
landmarks of 21st century China.
Designing Change: the Coins of Elizabeth II
A coins and medals display
18 September 2008 – February 2009
Admission free
Room 69a
In 2008 new reverse designs will be introduced for all UK coins up
to the 50p piece. These will replace the designs that have been in
use since the decimalisation 40 years ago.
This small exhibition puts the new coin reverses into context,
by looking at coin design during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
Drawing on the rich collections of the British Museum and the Royal
Mint Museum, it will include artwork from the current competition,
and sketches, models and trials from previous designs.
China Landscape
3 May – 27 October 2008
In a unique partnership the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the
British Museum are preparing to install a Chinese landscape in the
Museum's forecourt - to be in place for May 2008 and running into
the Autumn. China Landscape will follow
on from the success of the Africa Garden constructed at the British
Museum in 2005.
It will be designed to reflect natural habitats in China, but
will also incorporate elements of more formal Chinese gardens. The
plants will be selected by the experts at Kew to be broadly
representative of the vast range of China's indigenous species. The
landscape will allow a range of historical and contemporary issues
to be explored and will show the relationship between the
development of Chinese culture and the country's natural
environment. It will make clear thematic connections with the
British Museum's outstanding collection of Chinese objects. A wide
ranging programme of public activities will be devised to
complement the landscape.
Continuing exhibitions
The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army
13 September 2007 – 6 April 2008
Admission charge, sponsored by Morgan Stanley
Reading Room
Continuing until April 2008, The First
Emperor is already the most successful exhibition at
the British Museum in over thirty years. Featuring examples of the
iconic terracotta warriors, alongside new discoveries the
exhibition provides an insight into China's First Emperor, Qin
Shihuangdi, and his legacy. The First Emperor created what we
know today as China, how that state has survived, developed and is
viewed today will be explored through events, lectures and debates
around the exhibition. A special event will be held to celebrate
Chinese New Year in February 2008.
Inhuman Traffic: The Business of the Slave
A coins and medals display
24 May 2007 – 6 April 2008
Admission free
Room 69a
This exhibition takes a broad look at the Transatlantic Slave
Trade, touching on how it functioned, and how it was ended. The
display examines the commodities involved in the slave trade and
the way in which it linked Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia,
into a global trade network: from gold and ivory which first took
European traders to West Africa and tobacco, guns, textiles, sugar
and rum which enabled the trade to flourish. A section about the
ending of the trade examines both the abolitionists' campaign,
which led to the passage of a bill in parliament in March 1807
banning the slave trade in the British Empire, as well as the part
played by the enslaved peoples in their own liberation from the
trade, such as the revolution of Henri Toussaint L'Ouverture in
Haiti and the rebellions lead by Nanny of the Maroons in
Jamaica.
Exhibitions at other venues in the UK
Throughout 2008, the British Museum will be touring exhibitions
to venues across the country through the Partnership UK programme,
as well as contributing to numerous other exhibitions and displays
nationwide. Highlights include:
As a precursor to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum,
one of the star objects, a bronze head of the Emperor will travel
to each end of Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England. The head was
found in the Thames in 1834 and has never been seen outside London
before. Face of an Emperor: Hadrian Inspects the
Wall began at Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery,
Carlisle (11 February – 13 April 2008), followed by Segedunum Roman
Fort, Baths and Museum, Wallsend (16 April – 8 June 2008). The tour
is supported by BP and the Heritage Lottery Fund
Ancient Greece: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes,
the first of a series of exhibitions covering the great
civilisations of the world will continue its UK tour at Wardown
Park Museum in Luton, Lincoln, South Shields and Glasgow. Funded by
the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the
Department for Children, Schools and Families as part of the
Strategic Commissioning Programme for Museum and Gallery Education
2006-9. Additional support is provided through the generosity of
the Dorset Foundation.
Lindow Man: a bog body mystery (19 April 2008 –
19 April 2009) is an exhibition created by the Manchester Museum
around the mid-1st century AD body from the British Museum that was
found in a peat bog at Lindow Moss in Cheshire in 1984. The
body is accompanied by other loans of the same period from the
British Museum’s collection, including a spectacular bronze shield
boss found in the River Thames at Wandsworth.
Fabric of a Nation, the vibrant display of
textiles shown at the British Museum in 2007 to mark the 50th
anniversary of Ghanaian independence, will be on show at the
Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead (14 June -2 November, 2008), then
continue to Cartwright Hall, Bradford and two venues in Hampshire.
Supported through the generosity of the Dorset Foundation.
Exhibitions at other venues internationally
A New World: England’s First View of America
20 October 2007 – January 13 2008: North Carolina Museum of
History, Raleigh, US
6 March - 1 June 2008: Yale Center for British Art
15 July – 15 October 2008: Jamestown Settlement
John White, a gentleman and artist, was key to shaping England’s
first view of America though the extraordinary watercolours he
produced whilst on the first English voyages to the New World in
the 1580s. White was a member of the earliest expeditions to
Roanoke, in what was then called Virginia, which were sent out by
Queen Elizabeth’s sometime favourite Walter Raleigh. While there
White drew the North Carolina Algonquian Indians, their
surroundings and the local flora and fauna. These drawings are the
only surviving visual record of this period of America’s history.
All of White’s original drawings are in the British Museum’s
collection and will go on public display for the first time in
forty years alongside objects that help to explore these
fascinating Elizabethan voyages.
Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
6 February – 30 April 2008: Dubai International Finance
Centre
Following a successful run at the British Museum in May 06, Word
Into Art will travel to Dubai. The exhibition celebrates the
creativity of Middle Eastern artists by focusing on the way writing
has been used in modern art. From traditional Arabic scripts to
present day graffiti, artists across the region have found
innovative ways of using script. They write verses from the Qur’an,
lines of poetry, use texts to highlight their preoccupation with
politics, or simply show their delight in the shape of the Arabic
letter. It is this rich diversity of approaches that this
exhibition seeks to examine.
The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army
15 November 2008 – 26 April 2009: High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia
US
Following on from the phenomenal success of the run at the
British Museum, this major loan exhibition presents a reassessment
of one of the best known discoveries in world archaeology, the
Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of China. Featuring the
largest loan of terracotta objects ever agreed by China, including
exciting recent discoveries, the exhibition provides an insight
into the life and legacy of China's First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi.
The First Emperor conquered the Warring States of the region and
was the effectively created what we know today as China in 221 BC,
making it the oldest surviving political entity in the world.
For images or further information please call the Press Office
on +44 (0) 20 7323 8583/8522 or email communications@britishmuseum.org
Communications Department contacts:
Hannah Boulton, Head of Press and Public Relations: +44 (0) 20
7323 8522
hboulton@britishmuseum.org
Katrina Whenham, Press Assistant: +44 (0) 20 7323 8583
kwhenham@britishmuseum.org