Exhibits popping up

WORDS Liam Stretch

While Canterbury Museum undergoes a $205 million redevelopment over the next five years, the most significant in its century and a half existence, it has had to look elsewhere to house exhibits and keep the people of Ōtautahi Christchurch and visitors alike enthralled.

Alongside Ravenscar House and Quake City, they have a pop-up museum just a stone’s throw away from the Rolleston Avenue buildings, housed at CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki. 

Open since July, the museum has leased the CoCA building for the duration of its redevelopment. 

Currently, it’s exhibiting Six Extinctions, featuring the life-sized cast of the largest T-rex skeleton ever found – alongside displays of collection highlights and visitor favourites. 

The world-renowned Gondwana Studios produced Six Extinctions. After premiering last year at the South Australia Museum in Adelaide, Christchurch visitors can now travel back some 485 million years to a time when complex life lived only in the sea and the first plants appeared on land. 

The journey continues as time progresses, and the top predators in each geological period begin to appear: Dunkleosteus, a giant armoured fish that terrorised the seas; Inostrancevia, a tiger-sized sabre-toothed beast; Postosuchus, a giant carnivorous reptile, and then the Tyrannosaurus rex.

If you’re a scientist at heart, you’ll know there have only been five mass extinctions, so where does the sixth come in? The exhibit then brings us to the modern-day extinction crisis: climate change – which is the first caused by a single species, humans.

In the other half of the gallery space, the challenge for the team was to distil the feel of Canterbury Museum into only 80 objects, considering the 2.3 million items they had on display and in storage at the original site.

Museum Director Anthony Wright said the items chosen from the collection were central to the museum’s identity.

“We’ve selected for display taonga which represent the breadth and depth of the collection ranging from a group of taxidermied animals through to historic objects from the Antarctic, Mountfort, and Early Settlers galleries. We have beautiful taonga Māori and Pasifika for visitors to see alongside two firm visitor favourites, the horse from The Christchurch Street and Ivan Mauger’s gold bike.”

The museum is undergoing redevelopment to ensure its future. With a growing number of visitors every year, significant heritage buildings, and items valued in excess of a billion dollars, the need for a state-of-the-art space has never been more paramount. The new space will have the ability to change out exhibits more often and more easily, display more items, engage with visitors more freely, and improve its local bicultural narrative.

With a recent $10 million government funding boost, these all seem set to come to fruition, and it is sure to be a great space for learning and fun for the next 150 years, at least. 

You’ll find Canterbury Museum at CoCA at 66 Gloucester Street, and Six Extinctions is on till 3 December.