- Venue
- The Wellcome Collection
- Location
- London
Kate Forde and Mike Findley the curator and press officer met me in the entrance hall of the Wellcome Trust. I was listening to the history of Henry Wellcome on one of the many multi media displays. “Henry Wellcome was born in the days of the wild west”,
begins the audio reading in a sort of 50’s cinematic voice. This is a rags to riches story of an entrepreneur, philanthropist, patron of science and pioneer of aerial photography.
More than 150 years after his birth in 1853, Henry Wellcome and the Wellcome Trust present this cross-section of extraordinary scientific curiosity objects alongside the work of some of todays leading artists.
The collection opened in its current venue in June 2007 at the impressive Wellcome library building in central London, opposite Euston. There are three exhibitions, two are permanent; ‘Medicine man’ – a collection of medical antiquity and curiosity, ‘Medicine now’ – an exhibition of contemporary art and science exhibits exploring new medical discoveries and one changing display on the ground floor. There is also the world-famous Wellcome Library, a cafe, bookshop, conference centre and members' club.
My visit coincided with the exhibition ‘Sleeping and Dreaming.’ An excellent exhibition on tour from Germany. Curated by Kate Forde, this exhibition displayed artifact alongside medical apparatus, art findings along side research, art happenings alongside social experiments. The beauty of this type of display is in the play with the ambiguity of the art and non-art objects, how they interact and add value to one another. This is also an exhibition of choice, what to leave out would have been as difficult as to what to include.
My favorite choice was a simple piece entitled ‘Another Day’ by Paul Ramirez Jonas. Four low-res TV monitors counting down sunrises all over the world in real time. The economy of this piece is outstanding, at once it sums up the subject and mystery of sleep, insomnia and dreaming.
During April and May the collection will play host to ‘Life before Death’ a challenging exhibition looking at life at it’s most poignant phase. ‘Journalist Beate Lakotta and photographer Walter Schels asked 24 terminally ill people if they could accompany them during their last weeks and days. From these vigils came a series of insightful descriptions and photographic portraits taken before and after death. Far from being gloomy, these intimate concerns of the dying reveal the preciousness and transience of life, and make us question what we often take for granted.’
The Wellcome Trust is one of the world’s biggest funding bodies of research into biomedical science, human and animal welfare. Increasingly this funding has also been extended to artists who work in collaboration with scientists. Indeed as you enter the hall you are greeted by two sculptures by leading contemporary artists. Recently the fund has supported a wide variety of artistic and scientific activity from Marcus Coates’s experimentation of bird song to helping us find our Viking roots in DNA. The importance of this funding is yet to be truly appreciated. The opportunities this funding will afford artists and scientists will only help fuel a rebirth in science and inspire a new generation of scientists to look at the world differently. Hopefully a fusion of an artist’s creative vision and a scientists will for change can help advance cures and raise the standard of life for us all.
