Cabinets of Consequence is an exhibition that re-assembles University College London’s collections within the context of ecological change and techno-scientific acceleration. It traces the multiple effects of everyday materials and artefacts reconfiguring the collections within a geopolitical web of contemporary life and its possible futures.

The objects, real and fabricated, are arranged around four intersecting thematic areas: Agriculture-Animals, Energies-Resources, Media-Natures and Afterlives-Extinctions. The exhibition asks questions about the impact of farming and animals upon the Earth’s eco-system, fossil fuel extraction and entangled military-industrial collisions of war and trade, the blurring of technology and the natural world, the inevitability of finitude and the possible worlds it may bring.

The exhibition includes artefacts from The Grant Museum of Zoology, Geology Collections, The Petrie Museum, UCL Art Museum, Pathology and Bio-anthropology collections. The development of the exhibition involved research with the following UCL departments: Global Change Science (Geography), Alternative Futures For Heritage (Archeology) Environmental Design and Engineering (Architecture).

Cabinets of Consequence was commissioned by UCL Culture and presented at The Octagon Gallery, June 2016-May 2017. The exhibition has been written about by the scholar Jussi Parrika in a forthcoming book Remain, Meson Press, Oct 2018.

Cabinets of Consequence Microsite