BONE OF CONTENTION
Despite the multitude of skulls and macabre paraphernalia in his Museum of Natural Mystery, Bruce Mahalski says that his intention isn’t to shock visitors: it’s to remind us of the hubris of humans and our detachment from nature.
Bruce Mahalski says the aim of his Museum of Mystery is to educate about man’s disconnection with nature.
Looking around the Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery, the biggest misconception you could make is that its founder and creator is obsessed with death. Sure, the walls and display cases are lined with skulls (about 200), bones (both animal and human), and other macabre paraphernalia from preserved insects and rare vintage medical texts, to a piece of a sculpture from Wellington’s Inverlochy Art School which, if the stories are to be believed, was damaged by a poltergeist.
But for Bruce Mahalski, who purchased the Royal Terrace property in 2017 and spent a year filling four of its front rooms with biological and ethnological curiosities and cultural artefacts from a personal collection some two decades in the making, the exhibitions have more to do with life than with whatever happens next.
“Fundamentally, it’s a museum of natural and social history,” says Mahalski. “So it’s about the natural world and our connection to it as humans, and trying to make very plain what that connection or relationship is and has been.
“Bones aren’t these negative things that people see them as, they’re vestiges of life, not death. They reveal interesting things about the local history, the land, and the people that might have lived there.”
The son of a doctor and a psychologist, both avid collectors whose professional and social circles consisted largely of other “scientist types”, Mahalski says his own interest in collecting and his dual fascination with both the natural world, and the universe’s unknowable questions, was a product of his upbringing. As a child, he enjoyed a sporadic correspondence with famous British naturalist Gerald Durrell, whose landmark contribution to wildlife conservation informed Mahalski’s lifelong artistic thesis that no one species on earth is better than another.
“One of the key underlying messages of my work has always been that we are animals, and we need to step up to being animals,” he says. “We need to do a better job of it. It’s like we’ve become detached from nature and we need to reattach ourselves, and subsequently realise that we’re not in control.
“I’ve always thought that human beings are extremely arrogant creatures, with these ideas about God and all the rest of it. The hubris of the human animal never fails to astound.”
A handful of artworks that incorporate both human and animal bones are the most tangible, visual expression of this message, designed to impress upon the viewer that once you strip it all back, we are all the same. “It’s like putting human beings back in the mix,” says Mahalski.
“A lot of the works I do I think of as site-specific works, so the work contains and speaks to the ecology of a particular area. There’s numerous ways you can look at it, but it’s really about trying to represent a picture of the environment at that moment. And to take human beings out of the picture and pretend we’re not there, it wouldn’t tell the same story.”
He insists that these artworks make up a very small portion of what he does. “They’re too controversial, people just freak out. And to be very clear, I don’t seek out human bones, I don’t want to collect human bones,
I’m not trying to make loads of art with human bones. I’ve gotten in trouble for this before, people thinking I’m some kind of ghoul who’s out robbing graves. No. It’s just like collecting anything else – once people know you collect it, it starts coming to you. But whenever I get given a human bone, I’ll try and find out where it came from. Usually I’ll take it to my mates down at the anatomy museum and we try to find it a good home in the teaching programme.”
Uninterested in shock value and instead motivated to engage people in ideas of who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going, Mahalski is encouraged by the interest visitors have shown in his exhibits. There are of course the odd few who ‘don’t get it’, and he’s especially mindful of not causing unnecessary offence. “I have been fairly heavily criticised before for the human bones, in particular by the tangata whenua, who firmly believe that human remains are sacred. I totally get that, and I try to respect it by not pushing my work in people’s faces.”
At the same time, with climate change ever closer to “toppling humanity’s house of cards”, the conversations Mahalski is trying to provoke with his artworks and displays truly are a matter of life or death. “These are really important issues that we need to be discussing, because we’re heading towards extinction if we don’t.”
“BONES AREN’T THESE NEGATIVE THINGS PEOPLE SEE THEM AS.” BRUCE MAHALSKI