We have a packed month of events taking place both at the Wellcome Collection and around the UK, funded by our Engaging Science Awards.
Upcoming events include a showcase of the best and worst public health films of the 20th Century, an event celebrating humankind’s relationship with the whale, and an exhibition based on an artist’s personal experience of infertility and assisted conception. Take your pick!
Events
Dragon Café - Borough – every Monday in September
Bethlem Museum of the Mind and the Bethlem Gallery are co-curating a month at the Dragon Café, Mental Fight Club’s creative and imaginative space. Open every Monday from 12-8.30pm, activities include a panel discussion – ‘We Need to Talk About Sanctuary After the Asylum’ (15th September) and a site-specific dance performance, ‘Curdled’ (22nd September).
Ancient Medicine: Secrets of the Greeks – Wellcome Collection – 3pm-4pm, 4th September
The teaching of Hippocrates lies at the very foundation of Western medicine, but the early Greek understanding of the body remains a fascinating contrast to what we believe today. Discover how to coax a ‘wandering womb’ back to its rightful place and why Greek doctors waited for a ‘crisis’ during an illness.
Hendricks Carnival of Knowledge– Port Merion Festival – 4th-6th September
A day of events on the theme of ‘the universe inside your head’, including a memory clinic installation, a sonic tour of the brain, jelly-brain dissections, a zombie workshop with Frank Swain, an investigation into the history of lost emotions, and the chance to hear from neuroscientist Anil Seth about the mysteries of consciousness. Guerilla Science runs these events.
Health, Lies and Videotape – Electric Cinema, Birmingham – 8th September
Take a look at some of the best and worst public health films of the 20th Century in this session where experts will help you separate the fact from the fiction, and the daft from the downright dangerous… This People Award funded project run by the Academy of Medical Sciences takes places from 8-10pm as part of the British Science Festival.
Into the Unknown – Wellcome Collection – 7pm-8.30pm, 11th September
Carried along by the Age of Sail, humanity’s global curiosity sought out both medical innovations and cultural exchange. In this discussion uncover our human desire to question the unknown and the impact this has had on our minds and bodies. Who were these intrepid explorers, and what are today’s new challenges?
Packed Lunch: Music and Emotion – Wellcome Collection – 1pm-2pm, 17th September
Free event – first to arrive gets first pick of the seats! Listening to music is universal, but why do we like it so much? And how does it provoke such an emotional response? Join Marcus Pearce to hear about his research into the psychological mechanisms underlying our enjoyment of music.
Inner Voices, Inner Music – Durham – 17th-18th September
A two-day workshop about ‘voice-hearing’ and musical hallucinations, involving speakers from a broad range of disciplines. The Clerks will give a pilot performance of their new piece, ‘Musical Hauntings’.
Open House London– Bethlem Royal Hospital – 20th September
This will be the first chance to visit the new Museum of the Mind, in the Art Deco former administration block of the hospital. Tours will take place at 10 and 11am: arrive early, as spaces are very limited. The museum will be open until 5pm, with a chance to find out more about the opening of the Museum of the Mind in early 2015.
The Whale: an Exploration- National Maritime Museum – 20th September
A unique day-long event of celebration and investigation funded by a Small Arts Award, navigating the fluctuating human relationship with one of the ocean’s most remarkable and threatened creatures. Philip Hoare (Leviathan, The Sea Inside), sound-recordist and composer Chris Watson (Life, Frozen Planet), former whaler and Greenpeace activist John Burton, Mark Carnall (Grant Museum, UCL) and other leading scientists join acclaimed artist filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland for a multi-faceted voyage into the extraordinary world of the whale.
Medicine Unboxed – Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham – 22nd-23rd November
This annual conference to inspire debate and cultural change in medicine, sessions will explore human life and consciousness within the world of other life and lives, and our shared human matter and frailty.
The Thing Is… Morbid Anatomy – Wellcome Collection – 7pm-8pm, 25th September
Joanna Ebenstein, Creative Director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, unravels the paradoxes that encircle early anatomical objects: life and death, science and art, animate and inanimate. (Audio description supported.)
Performances
The Russian Doctor – Birmingham Rep – 10th-13th September
In 1890, Anthon Chekhov journeyed alone for three months across 3,000 miles of Siberian wilderness to make good on his commitment to medicine, to document the harrowing living conditions of the exiles and convicts incarcerated on the remote Tsarist penal colony of Sakhalin Island. This theatre performance, funded through the Large Arts Awards, tells his story.
Lost in the Neuron Forest – 10th October-1st November
Supported by a People Award, this show is a story about memory and how it defines us, and an exploration into what becomes of us when our memories are gone. What begins as an interactive lecture on the science of the brain becomes a personal story of one woman’s struggle to hold onto who she is. Performances start on 10th October at the Southwark Playhouse, then tours to various venues around the UK.
Lost in the Neuron Forest
Exhibitions
Investment – Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – 27th September-27th October
Tabitha Moses’ new exhibition, ‘Investment’, is based on her experience of infertility, assisted conception, and successful donor egg IVF. It will be accompanied by a publication, programme of talks, discussion group comprising artist-parents, a gallery-based family activity and a series of creative workshops with users of The Hewitt Fertility Centre (Liverpool Women’s Hospital).
Voice Trunk – Winchester Science Centre
The Voice Trunk is a beautiful, midnight-blue, touchable sculpture which invites you to make vocal sound. You can sculpt that sound: twist and shape it with your hands and fingers. You can make a little composition. Alone or with up to four others, you can play and echo and shift and squeak it. The Voice Trunk takes visitors on a journey through what their voices can do, while helping them reflect on the human vocal body, sound and communication.
Unravelled – Wellcome Collection, Studio Windows – 2nd-21st September
What do we remember, how do we remember it, and what prompts us to remember it? Taking place in the Studio windows, this project, led by artist Sarah Carne, is a collaboration between art and psychology students at St Marylebone School.
Eye Contact – Wellcome Trust Windows, London – until 2015
The Wellcome Trust Window Commission hosted a competition to design a display that responded to the changing perception of images. On show in the large windows of the Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road, ‘Eye Contact’ – a winning entry by Peter Hudson – responds to our ever-increasing reliance on the screen for human communication.
An Idiosyncratic A to Z of the Human Condition – Wellcome Collection, London – until 12thOctober
From Acts of Faith to Zoonoses, we present An Idiosyncratic A to Z of the Human Condition. Using Henry Wellcome’s strange and wonderful collection of objects (from medical artefacts and paintings to photography and sculpture), we invite you to consider: what is the human condition?
This free exhibition warmly invites visitor interaction – leave your own human traces in the gallery itself or in the virtual world: On Twitter or Instagram by tagging with #HumanCondition
Online
The Great War: The People’s Story – ITVplayer (before end of September)
If you’re quick, you can still catch the entire series that marks the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, on ITVplayer. The programmes have an underlying focus on the medical innovations triggered by the demands of wartime casualties during the first world war.
Credit: Bill McConkey, Wellcome Images
Body of Songs
A collection of ten songs by some of the UK’s most talented artists, inspired by the body’s organs. Each artist explores an organ with the help of experts, to find out how it works and unlock its mysteries and myths. Along the way they ask profound questions about their own lives; about illness and disease, and age and suffering. Artists include Bat for Lashes, Goldie, and Ghostpoet.
Colliding Worlds
Wellcome Collection recently hosted ‘Colliding Worlds’, an event exploring the extraordinary research of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, in the thought-provoking context of a conversation with curator and art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist. From astronomy and ecological disaster to science fiction and advice to young scientists, watch the exchange online and download the transcript.
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