Unruly bodies and minds in the medical museum
Following Mat Fraser’s astonishing and award-winning commission Cabinet of Curiosities that toured UK museums in 2015, Exceptional & Extraordinary is inviting four artists to explore behind the scenes of eight of the UK’s most renowned medical museums.
In collaboration with experts in medical history, disability and museums – they are currently producing a series of thought provoking new commissions that examine our attitudes towards difference and aim to stimulate debate around the implications of a society that values some lives more than others.
Jocelyn Dodd, Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) said: "We are delighted to be working with such an exciting mix of artists and experts across the fields of museums, disability and biomedicine. The unique process behind the project reflects RCMG’s established commitment to collaborative practice as a powerful means to address pressing social concerns."
The subsequent ticketed performances and film will tour throughout June 2016 to all eight partner museums, with different groupings of the commissions so that every performance is unique to each venue and with many of the performances supported by after-show discussion panels with invited experts as well as opportunities to view and handle some of the objects that have inspired the artists.
Funded through a Large Arts Award by the Wellcome Trust and a Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England, Exceptional & Extraordinary is an ambitious project that aims to engage visitors to all the partner museums, professionals in the field of biomedicine and the broader public in a reassessment of widely held assumptions surrounding physical and mental difference, disability and contemporary (often negative and discriminatory) attitudes towards disabled people.
The commissions will offer new ways of seeing that will be used to question and stimulate public, biomedical professional and media debate around the social, cultural and ethical implications of medicalised ways of understanding difference that pervade biomedical professional practice as well as shape broader public and societal attitudes towards disability and disabled people.
Professor Richard Sandell, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) added: "Museums hold enormous potential to stimulate debate about important contemporary issues and, at a time when disabled people are unfairly bearing the brunt of government cuts, we believe it is important to be exploring ways of harnessing that power to ask challenging questions."