Siberia: At the Edge of the World @ Manchester Museum

Preview by Sacha Waldron | 30 Aug 2014

The frozen plains of Siberia are a hot topic this year. In March, the Horniman in London opened the exhibition Whisper of the Stars: Traditional Life in Arctic Siberia, a collection of photographs portraying the traditional life of indigenous peoples across the remote Russian Arctic.

This October, Siberia comes to the North with Manchester Museum’s upcoming exhibition Siberia:  At the Edge of the World, which combines zoological specimens with artefacts, rare objects and photographs. One of the stars of the exhibition will be Masha, a baby mammoth who has been preserved in the Siberian permafrost for 42,000 years and is on loan from the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. Within the Mammoth section of the exhibition, Masha will be shown alongside a woolly mammoth model from London’s Natural History Museum, as well as tusks and carvings.

Other taxidermy from Siberia on show includes a brown bear ('Basha'?), which Manchester Museum has recently bought from Russia for its collection and which will be shown for the first time, as well as reindeer, wolverine and some rare Siberian birds.

The exhibition gives an insight into the Siberian landscape, natural world and people of the area, with sections on life from the Arctic Circle to the wilds of the Taiga Forest and the grassy plains of the Steppes, reflecting a vast area where the climate veers between -50°C in the Siberian winter to summers as hot as +40°C.  Hunting, fishing and the everyday life of the Siberian people are explored through objects and portraits.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Dmitri Logunov, Curator of Arthropods at Manchester Museum, and Dr David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Earth Science Collections at Manchester Museum.

#MMSiberia | @mcrmuseum

Siberia: At the Edge of the World will run from 4 October 2014 – 1 March 2015 in the Museum's Temporary Exhibitions Gallery http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk