Up until recently, the Bahrain National Museum housed a section dedicated to showing the country’s natural history. Through a series of dioramas, stuffed animals and imagery–this section of the museum offered context to the rest of the museum, showcasing the relationship between civilization and the ecology that enables it.

As of the last ten years this section of the museum has been moved elsewhere, first to the now defunct Science Center and is currently missing.

As Bahrain faces unprecedented environmental degradation we must ask what the role of both museum and natural history are for us today and at what point did nature both cease to be part of history and the present?

Our proposal for an installation as part of the National Museum’s 30th anniversary is to temporarily house the natural history portion of the museum, allowing visitors to to experience and learn about the flora, fauna and ecology of Bahrain. By creating this little pavilion, an architectural reminder of the National Museum (with vaults and implied rotated cube), oriented both to the sea and to the national museum we ask what our relationship to the natural is and how it has changed over the course of the past century.