Over view: Downloading Ghosts: Hauntology of Taxidermy is a large-scale installation composed of hundreds of hand-formed paper bodies made using hanji, traditional Korean paper. The work draws from gime, a shamanic paper-making practice from Jeju Island, historically used to invite spirits, deities, and ghosts into material form.

Each paper body corresponds one-to-one with a bird specimen housed in the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History. The dimensions of each form are reconstructed from archival data recorded on specimen tags—such as total length, wingspan, tail length, and beak measurements—translating scientific data into sculptural presence. Through this process, the installation asks: can a ritual form “download” data, and if so, does data itself become a kind of ghost?

Suspended across the exhibition space, the work re-materializes digitized knowledge, tracing how biological bodies are abstracted into data and circulated across institutions. By bringing together taxidermy and ritual practice, Downloading Ghosts engages with the hauntological conditions of scientific knowledge—where histories of extraction, preservation, and classification continue to shape what is remembered, archived, or forgotten.

Positioning the exhibition as a site of knowledge production, the work invites viewers to encounter data not as neutral information, but as something embedded with absence, memory, and unresolved ethical relations between human and nonhuman worlds.

This work emerges from an intensive, ongoing relationship with the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History. Through weekly access to the taxidermy archives every Monday, alongside direct participation in a taxidermy internship every Thursday (12–6pm), Chaelim Lim has engaged closely with the processes through which scientific knowledge is materially produced.

Working alongside specimens—handling, observing, and assisting in their preparation—she encounters taxidermy not simply as a method of preservation, but as a complex site of transformation. Measurements are taken, tissues are sampled, bodies are skinned, and data is recorded; each step translates a once-living being into multiple forms of knowledge that circulate across scientific institutions.

This sustained engagement shapes her understanding of how natural history is constructed: not as a neutral accumulation of facts, but as a set of practices that determine what is preserved, how it is measured, and which aspects of life become legible as data.

For Lim, this raises an urgent question: what happens to the presence of the body within these processes of abstraction? As biological beings are transformed into data, images, and specimens, something persists—an excess that cannot be fully contained within scientific representation. Downloading Ghosts approaches this remainder as a form of haunting, asking how artistic and ritual practices might re-materialize what scientific systems render invisible or extractable.

In Lim’s work, haenyeo (women free-divers of Jeju Island) are positioned as kin to taxidermied birds—not through resemblance, but through their shared entanglement within scientific regimes that extract, circulate, and stabilize knowledge. Recent biological research on haenyeo—including studies of their genetic and physiological adaptations—has led to their bodies being sampled, analyzed, and circulated across global research institutions in the United States and beyond. In this process, the haenyeo body, like that of the preserved bird, becomes a scientific object: a site from which data is extracted, standardized, and redistributed.

This parallel reveals a shared condition. Both haenyeo and taxidermied birds are rendered as subjects of Western modern knowledge—measured, archived, and made legible through institutional systems. Yet Lim’s work turns toward a different question: what forms of knowledge emerge from within these bodies themselves?

Within haenyeo communities, gime—a shamanic paper-making practice—and the rituals that accompany it function as a mode of knowledge production and transmission. Through these practices, knowledge is not extracted and abstracted, but embodied, relational, and collectively sustained. As articulated by haenyeo themselves, such practices carry ways of knowing that are inseparable from lived experience, memory, and ongoing relations with the sea.

By placing haenyeo, gime, and taxidermied birds in relation, Lim asks whether this mode of knowledge-making can be extended beyond its original context. If gime operates as a technique for giving temporary body to what is unseen, might it also offer a way to re-engage scientific archives—not as fixed repositories of data, but as sites where other forms of knowledge can be produced, shared, and sustained?