Wellcome Collection

A is for Acts of Faith, B is for Birthdays, C is for Chemical Life Support… Z is for Zoonoses.

Explore our idiosyncratic A to Z illustrated with a curious combination of Henry Wellcome’s weird and wonderful collection of objects, medical artefacts, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and some equally intriguing contemporary artworks.

Watch the birth of the first test-tube baby (B for Birthdays), listen to Florence Nightingale speak (V for Voice) and sneak a peek at porcelain fruit showing sexual foreplay (X for X-rated).

Our fabulous visitor experience team will further feed your curiosity with live ‘busking’ on topics such as neuroscience and phantom limb syndrome, and offer lessons in forgotten skills such as foot binding, trephination and phrenology. Busking activities take place every day at 11.30–12.00 and 14.30–15.00, and also at 18.30–19.00 on Thursdays.

We invite you, as fellow experts on the #HumanCondition, to add your own idiosyncrasies to this quirky show by participating in the gallery or via social media. See ‘For your contribution’ below.

This exhibition runs throughout the summer ahead of our £17.5 million redevelopment, to be completed in autumn 2014.

Suitable for

• Family friendly

Website

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/human-condition.aspx

In July 2015 Wellcome Collection will present a major exhibition of works by acclaimed artist, Alice Anderson: ‘Memory Movement Memory Objects’. Anderson’s sculptures are entirely mummified in copper thread, creating glistening landscapes of beautiful, uncanny and transformed objects. Each piece is an exploration and act of memory. Both the making and display of works interrogate how we create, recall, transform and seal the past and imagine the future. Over 100 works will be displayed and, uniquely, visitors will be invited to contribute to the creation of a new work during the run of the exhibition, as a car from the artist’s life is mummified in the gallery.

The gallery will carry the mesmerising glint of displayed treasure, akin to entering a Pharaoh’s tomb, but the objects on show are fashioned relics, or new archaeology. Strikingly lit, the sheen of copper is, for the artist, key to the absorbing physical and mental experience of entombing objects. The process of mummification is simultaneously a gesture of protection and an invocation of death, and Anderson’s exquisite sculptures pose challenging questions about the comforts and consolations of creating and sharing memories. Offering an alternative way of remembering, the exhibition will animate the terrain where movement, objects and consciousness meet.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/memory-movement-memory-objects.aspx