Biomedicine on Display

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items.

Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was good timing that in the space of one day I received two emails. The first was about The Museum of Non-Visible Art and the second was a call to submit work for an exhibition at the Manifest Gallery called Go Ahead…Touch Me!

Both events are held in New York City:

The Museum of Non-Visible Art (MONA) comprises of artworks that are not visible but only conceptualized. The work is in the form of ideas that are described. It is through the description and experience of the imagination that the artworks are understood.

The Manifest gallery invites the opposite. Described as ‘An international exhibit exploring works that invite physical interaction’ the Go Ahead…Touch Me! exhibition seeks to display the physical, not just the conceptual.

This exhibition is on until September 9^th — I wonder if I could interest someone from the exhibition to come and demonstrate the event at the Sensuous Object Workshop a few weeks after this.

I am not convinced either of these are solutions, but they make one think and suggest that perhaps art can show museums the way.

On my continuing investigation into the aesthetics of rollators I was told about the Danish Queen Ingrid. After falling and breaking her hip, she appeared in the summer of 1998 for the first time publically using a rollator. Photographs and news footage of her shows her dressed in a glamorous couture gown and pushing a matching coloured rollator. Going to a gala wearing her prom dress and matching rollator and proudly escorted by her grandson Prince Frederik became a powerful image that encouraged others not to be ashamed of their rollators.

Determined to draw this culturally and historically important artifact I found that there was an exhibition about Queen Ingrid’s life at the Amalienborg Museum.

In the final room many of Queen Ingrid’s clothes were on display and in a long glass display cabinet that filled the entire wall of one room was her famous prom dress and there, peeking out shyly from behind the dress that lumpy, squat rollator lurked.

The accompanying sign reads:

“Rollator. With advanced age Queen Ingrid experienced difficulty in walking. In 1998 she attended a public event for the first time with a rollator-a wheeled walking frame. This had great significance for elderly people in the country, who then, with Queen Ingrid as role model, no longer felt that it was embarrassing to use a rollator”

I was slightly disappointed to find that the rollator was partially hidden as though embarrassed of being on display.

I wrote to ask for permission to draw it and was informed that this was not in fact the Queen’s rollator but an exact replica. In further conversations all was explained. This is not the actual one used by Queen Ingrid because, as happens in the case of every Danish citizen, when she died the original rollator was returned to the commune and once more became the property of the health service. No one will ever know if they are using the same rollator as the Queen Mother once used. The one on display is the same model manufactured at the same time and representative of the one she used. It is an Opal Futura 450 made by Dolomite and manufactured in early 1997 so was an up to the minute model when used by Queen Ingrid. Importantly the colour, which is mint, was not made to match her dress. The material for the dress was found to match the rollator.

The staff at the Amalienborg museum were incredibly helpful. Every morning I would arrive just after 8am and the rollator was carefully removed from its case and placed in the middle of the room for me. I was then left to draw until 11am when the museum opened.

Queen Ingrid’s rollator is not ‘special’, it was not specially designed or commissioned or bespoke made to royal requirements. She used the same rollator as anyone else but chose a bright mint coloured one. And like other users, she probably felt it was ‘her’ rollator and relied on it in the same way as any other user would.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page.

I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day:

The computer is placed so that every staff member cannot avoid passing it on their daily routine oscillating between coffee machine and office.

Our hope is that the natural curiosity, so stimulated, will help us lure the more shy species of museum staff out on the web.

The experiment has already lead to promising results, as this twitter excerpt shows:

Follow the everyday life of Medical Museion; the museological object-apotheosis’, the indoor decorating debates, meteorological pocket philosophy, coffee drama and cake: https://twitter.com/medicalmuseion

Why not attend a postgrad course on ”Body images: gender inside/outside” in Paris with Lisa Cartwright, Adele Clarke and André Gunthert, 10-13 April:

The last few decades have witnessed rapid developments and innovations in visualization techniques. This is the case for a wide variety of visualization genres, whether in scientific fields, in the fashion industry or in the arts. There are, however, overlaps of style as well as techniques between different genres. As Lisa Cartwright notes, there is a symbiotic relationship between scientific and popular imaging technologies. In a similar vein, we find an interaction between art and science in the genre known as bio-art. In this PhD course/Research workshop we will explore images of relevance to the study of gendered bodies. This is an interdisciplinary course, and the concept of “body images” is to be understood in a broad sense, as transcending the categories of art and science, including art history.

 
More here. Application deadline: 20 February.

Upon arrival at Lotte residential care home on 7th December, I was greeted with the trappings of a party. The dining room had been recently decorated with candles and baubles for Christmas and the tables were set with Danish flags and napkins in honour of a resident’s birthday.

A chair was placed for me at a table. I sat next to Ingrid and opposite Inge and Nis. I had met Nis the previous week but he had no memory of me. He was very pleased to talk and introduced Inge to me as his fiancée.  Ingrid remembered me but did not recollect that I had drawn her. She seemed very pleased to see the drawing of herself when I showed it to her.

After eating together, I chose to depict Inge and Nis sitting next to each other in one drawing. Inge was very elegant and beautiful. Her silver hair still had a luster and a stylish wave. She wore a black fur sleeveless body warmer and a shirt with fashionable wide collar and cuffs. Strings of large beads and a set of smaller beads adorned her neck. Her mottled discoloured arms denote cellulitis but her hands did not seem to have signs of arthritis. She is 100 years old.

Nis always sits next to Inge. His adoration of her was obvious and on the day of my visit he was very proud to show her off to me. Nis who is 97, boasted about Inge’s age. He was an architect and was keen to look at my drawings. Every time I looked at Nis to draw him, he would make a funny face at me and chuckle. His high arching eyebrows betrayed his cheeky nature and his large cheeks became lost in the large ribbed neck of his cosy Nordic sweater.

They ate their meals; Nis had a special one as he is a vegetarian. They had a glass of wine and then enjoyed birthday cake and coffee.  Whilst both were rather hard of hearing they were clear and articulate.

After drawing Nis and Inge I drew Ruth. She had wanted me to draw her for the last couple of weeks. She is a youngster for Lotte, a mere 78 years old and had been there for 4 years. She is wheelchair bound and has restricted use in her right side, almost none on her left side and has problems speaking clearly but her intentions are always clear. Determined to perform the tasks of eating and drinking for herself as much as possible, Ruth was keen to participate.

Before we began she made a request, that I wait until someone came with her false teeth. It was very touching that she wanted to look her best for the drawing. She spent as much time as she could grinning at me, smiling as if for the camera but trying to sustain it through the long drawn out session. Her face is small and her petite body seemed to be even smaller in the big wheelchair she uses. Ruth’s already large eyes were enlarged through the thick lenses of her glasses and they gazed at me, smiling at me throughout the time I drew.

I returned to Lotte on 12^th January. I sat with Karen. She was a petite lady aged 97 with her white hair cut into a smart bob style. She had fallen before Christmas and gashed her forehead and had required 16 stitches but seemed to be quite happy that it was healing well. Lines were deeply etched around her cheeks and eyes and her strong nose seemed disproportionate to her small delicate face and large eyes.  Her mouth was in constant flux, never resting and never maintaining the same position for long.

She received a letter from her daughter, an artist living in California and only needed a little help to open the envelope. She was keen to show me a photo of her because I am an artist too. Sitting in her cosy cream cardigan she seemed very gentle but very able. Her pride in her daughter’s work was clear and her enjoyment of being drawn was obvious.

x

One of my favourite fellow bloggers, medical photographer Øystein Horgmo, has just written about how he was recently invited to document a family taking farewell of a young father in an intensive care unit.

It’s a moving story. But what actually caught my interest was this painting (by medical doctor Joseph Dwaihy and artist Sara Dykstra), which Øystein uses the illustrate the story.

Based on a photograph from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s first intensive care unit, circa 1955 (read more here), the painting is reminiscient of Norman Rockwell-realism. Like Rockwell, Dwaihy and Dykstra portray people in mundane situations. It’s people who play the primary role. The instruments are background props.

Compare Dwaihy and Dykstra’s painting of the 1955 ICU motif with a photo of a contemporary ICU unit. Today, there are indeed still people (a patient, a doctor, maybe a relative) around—but they seem to play a secondary role to the instruments.

In the cartoon below, the central role of instruments in an ICU is emphasized. The patient is invisible, the doctor is on his way out. Here the ICU is all about the instruments:

Visiting Lotte residential care home is always an experience. The first thing you notice upon entering is there are no signs warning you of something or pictograms and ideograms giving instructions. The next thing you notice is the lack of plastic. No carers in wipe down aprons, no wipe clean table clothes, plastic beakers or bibs. The tables have tablecloths, the residents have lunch as anyone would, using normal cutlery and china plates and they have beer or wine with their meals. This is not an institutionalized feeling care home.

My first session of drawing there was on November 24^th. After sitting and speaking with the delightful Nis who was an architect responsible for the main design around Rådhuspladsen, I sat next to Ingrid as we all played Bingo (Danish: Banko). Ingrid is 96. I had noticed her on my first visit because she wore a bright red, star shaped hair slide.

Ingrid was again wearing her star shaped hair slide. She was curious about my large hooped earrings and I pointed out when I am 96 I will probably still be wearing them. Her haircut was in a very smart bob style, which fell forward as she leaned over her cards to place buttons on the numbers being called. She has arthritis in her hands and the joints were swollen and enlarged, pulling the surrounding flesh taught across her hands. The hair caught up in her slide fell in a layer shorter than the rest of her hair and the tip of one arm of the star was partially obscured by the white strands.

I sat next to her; she was at the head of the table concentrating on her game, I sat on her right. I watched her and drew her while she was engaged in her activity. Several times she checked with a carer on her left which number were being called, just to be sure she had heard correctly. Once in a while she looked up and caught my eye. She smiled and shook her head. She was surprised and bemused that I was looking at her so intensely. She did not think she would be very interesting to draw.

She was. There were a great number of deep wrinkles on her face. Her brow and forehead had lines so deep they almost seemed to separate areas of her skin. Carved like plots of farrowed land. Shapes formed under her eyebrows and around the top of her nose and the deep lines etched by her lips formed long flowing crevasses. The teardrop droop of her jowl rested low and the extra flesh under her chin swept down by her neck. The shawl thrown around her shoulders had a fringe and was knotted at her sternum.

I asked her what career she had been in. She replied she was nothing special, just an ordinary person who never did anything special, just looked after the home and raised her children. That’s a pretty special thing in my opinion.

Remember Tom Cruise wawing hands in front of the imaginary screen in the movie Minority Report? Well, Hans Rosling (the famous visualiser-wizard of human demography) does it much better in this awesome presentation of changes in income and life expectance throughout the last 200 years. It’s a BBC production, and will certainly set new standards for digitally enhanced presentations—hopefully also in digitally enhanced museum exhibitions!

(tip from Jessica at Bioephemera; yes, she’s back again!:

Drew Berry, the outstanding molecular animator at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, says (according to Science Roll):

Scientists have always done pictures to explain their ideas, but now we’re discovering the molecular world and able to express and show what it’s like down there

I know Melbourne, Australia, in ‘down under’. But is the molecular world ‘down there’? Is ‘going down’ the best metaphor for going from the macroworld of the anatomical body to the microworld of the molecular body? Is it a vertical movement that comes first to mind? Are we going ‘deeper’ into the body, as if we were entering a deep mine?

My intuition is that we move ‘into’ the molecular world rather than ‘down to’ it.

Maybe Drew Berry is thinking in analogy to a microscope, where we look ‘down’ through the microscope on the tiny things below?

Rollator drawings, 30^th September – 4^th October 2010:

Continuing my appreciation of the aesthetics of seemingly ugly and mundane artefacts we associate with ageing, I investigated a second rollator.

This was a contemporary model. It had a clear plastic tray, a wire shopping basket and four wheels rather than three for extra stability. It was squatter, sturdier and in some ways even uglier than the earlier three wheel model. The hidden complexities and detailing within the design meant it took much longer to draw than I had anticipated.  I intentionally drew it from the position someone would see it if they were approaching it to use it.

The moulded plastic on the handles had been textured for extra grip and had an organic quality. The bolts and connections remained evident but were more refined.

What I found was how much I appreciated the qualities that I had previously missed. The curve of the front bumper and the connection on the front wheel shafts were particularly elegant and the sweep of the handles, handgrips and ergonomic brakes were much more aesthetically thought out than I had initially noticed. The light reflecting on the clear plastic tray formed bright curves and rainbow patterns in contrast to the opaque density of the black mat handles and shelf. The network formed by the basket was highly detailed and the intersecting areas had been welded neatly to form the grid of the shopping basket.

Interestingly, on the back of the rear metal legs were two orange rectangular strips of reflective material to ensure safety at night. The four wheels were not as fat as in the earlier model and the two at the back remained fixed whilst the two front wheels acted more like a shopping trolley.

Other things had not changed. The cuffs around the wheels remained the same, the mechanism for folding had not changed and the brake system appeared to be similar. The handles used to adjust the height of had become elongated and needed less effort to use.

Perhaps because these objects are so new, they are too close to us to be perceived as historical objects so have yet to become ‘artefacts’ i.e. something worthy of being presented within the auspices of a curated museum display where they would be expected to attract crowds who wish to engage with them. What would a member of the public hope to see when looking at an object such as this?

When objects are utilitarian, essential to many and in such common usage they can easily become invisible. The rollator is associated with assisting those who do not suffer from a terrible incurable disease but simply aids those who are just ageing as we all are, and need a little extra help. Is it because this is so uneventful, so usual we are not interested in looking at items associated with this natural process? Is it because the materials are thought of as utilitarian and not beautiful, or is it because we choose to turn away and not see something we find distasteful or fear but certainly do not welcome and embrace – the everyday process of ageing?

Rollator drawings  27^th–28^th, 28^th–29^th September 2010:

When I began drawing the rollator I asked myself why I was drawing something that was so boring, so ugly with no interesting features.

I was reminded of the talk Nurin Veis, Deputy Head Sciences – Science Communication and Senior Curator of Human Biology and Medicine at Museum Victoria, Australia, gave at the EAMHMS conference. In her talk about issues in displaying the cochlear implant, Nurin stated that the problem lies with our insistence in seeing the ‘black box’ item as ugly and not suitable as a museum artefact. Rather than trying to avoid it, rewrite it change or replace it with something explaining something about it, she asked why couldn’t we just accept it and learn to appreciate it? Maybe it is our job to see the aesthetic qualities of these ‘black box’ objects rather than try and avoid them.

The rollator’s use is essential to many, there is no doubt about that, but as an object, as a thing, it is so unappealing and uninteresting. It would not take long to draw such a simple plain thing.

Or so I thought. As I began I realized that the plastics had degenerated and the handles and wheels had an organic, sticky feeling to them. The way the brakes were attached to the wheels were far more complex than I had at first seen, but they were also connected by crude looking bolts. Mass produced steel rods had a feeling of hand madeness at the apex where they joined and the whole object took on a far more complicated nuance and styling than I had realized.

After 2 days, the amount of detail I had noticed changed my view of this object from boring and ugly to beautiful and fascinating. It’s complexities were hidden behind my prejudices and became seen clearly through my making the effort to spend time actually looking at this object and to stop making huge assumptions about it. How it worked, how it was made and the aesthetic of the object became more and more apparent during the two days I spent drawing it. Paying attention to such a modest and overlooked ungainly looking object showed it to be far more than I had at first perceived.

Overlooking such a vital yet seemingly unattractive object highlighted the need to spend time looking and building relationships with artefacts. The rollator has become, in my opinion a very beautiful object and reactions from others have been surprising also. Others have seen far more beauty in the drawing than they thought would ever be found in such an object. Maybe they will re-look at them and see them in a new way.

So many things associated with the ageing process are thought to be boring, ugly, utilitarian and uninteresting to look at. I am discovering for myself how wrong this assumption is. The toothless skull, so iconic of the image of ageing is fascinating and beautiful rather than ridiculous and unattractive.

Objects that help and assist the elderly, items used to test for ailments associated with ageing and objects used for treating them are all seen as having little aesthetic value as objects in their own right. And often the ageing population, the people themselves, are not regarded as being aesthetic so ingrained is it that beauty is connected with youth and newness.

Spending time looking at them, overcoming assumptions about them, elevating them from mere boring utilitarian thing to being experienced as unique, beautiful and fascinating encounters helps to re-see aspects of ageing in a much wider and more positive way.

Many of the most essential things in recent biomedicine are too small or too fast for the naked eye to see. At the session The biomedical invisibles, at the conference in September, Henrik Treimo and Victoria Höög addressed the issue of how to represent such invisibles.

How can we make objects, which escape an immediate visual encounter, visible or understandable to museum visitors, who are accustomed to engaging with material macroobjects and direct representation? Henrik pointed out that the frequently used cellular animations, often gives a too simplistic view of the phenomenon they are meant to depict. Read Henrik’s full abstract here.

Victoria emphasized that we need also to explore the epistemology of these current biomedical images. They seem more scientific and realistic than traditional drawings, but in fact they are just as constructed. Another problem with the medical illustrations of today is that they also are in a sense invisible to the untrained eye. One needs a specific medical insight to be able to interpret these images. Victoria suggested that a job for the medical museums might be to teach their publics to see and interpret. Read Victoria’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards it was put forth that all images in are constructed and therefore are able to ‘lie’. The question of whether these images bring us closer to, or further away from, our body, was also raised. There were comments from Thomas Söderqvist, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Silvia Casini and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference.

Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time and space for reflection afterwards. Read Morten’s full abstract here.

The next speaker, Sniff Andersen Nexø, talked about the meeting between research and exhibition making, as a desirable but not unproblematic way of curating an exhibition. She pointed out that it’s a great challenge to translate the theoretically informed academic research process into a display of physical objects and a minimum of words. Read Sniff’s full abstract here.

Suzanne Anker, the last speaker of the session, focused on the fetal body as a politically charged icon. We exercise power in the ways we choose to represent images of the fetus. The same object — a fetus — presented in different contexts and through different images sends very different messages. From thankfulness for diminished childbirth related death rates and cheers for scientific progress to calls for anti-abortion legislation and critiques of the psychological impact of prenatal diagnostics for handicapped people. Read Suzanne’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards, the question of whether or not museums have any responsibility for the way their fetal specimens are represented elsewhere, was raised. There were comments from Thomas Schnalke, Karen Ingham, Thomas Söderqvist, Kim Sawchuk, Nurin Veis, James Edmonson, Wendy Atkinson and Nina Czegledy.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen.

His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in use. Read Yves’ full abstract here.

Nurin Veis addressed much the same issue in her talk, focusing on changing our idea about what is aesthetically pleasing instead of trying to sex-up the object. Considering the physical nature of the visitor’s presence in the museum space, we should use that space in a theatrical way to give a full experience of the objects in a historical and scientific context.

By asking the visitors to use their bodies in ways they don’t usually do in a museum, and by providing the objects with a broader context, we can change the visitor’s views on which objects are boring and which are beautiful. Read Nurin’s full abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Morten Skydsgaard, Danny Birchall, Kim Sawchuk, Judy Chelnick, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Yin Chung Au, John Durant and Thomas Söderqvist.

See a list of all abstracts from the conference here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.