Exhibition: Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives, Wellcome Collection, London, until April 6 2010
Who are you? How do others see you? Are you determined more by science or society? These are some of the many questions posed by the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives.
This exhibition is part of “The Identity Project”, nine months of specialist exhibitions, experiments and events. The Wellcome Trust has designed it to coincide with the 10th anniversaries of both the Human Genome Project and the start of Big Brother UK, two landmarks in the debate on identity and self-perception.
Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, is among those included. Wellcome Collection
Entering the exhibition space, visitors can see the outsides of the eight wooden rooms are deliberately bland and characterless.
There is no given order in which to visit the rooms, and it doesn’t matter – each room is a separate little exhibition in itself, focusing on one aspect of identity. And it’s absolutely fascinating.
Despite its title, the exhibition contains many more than nine lives. The first room I visited is on phrenology (reading skulls to understand and determine personality traits), and is nominally about the discipline’s inventor, Franz Joseph Gall.
April Ashley was the first person in the UK to undergo gender reassignment. Wellcome Collection
However, within this room are head casts of Isaac Newton, Raphael, Voltaire and the Parisian murderer Lacenaire (whose skull apparently did not read like that of a murderer). There are also plenty of ordinary people represented in a collection to satisfy the most ardent historian.
My next stop was a room focusing on the perception of twins in modern society. In here again many different lives are represented, though the main focus is on three generations of one family with various twin relationships.
This space asks why twins are seen as special, and how living as a twin affects people’s views of themselves as individuals.
Hair was an important aspect of Claude Cahun's explorations of gender and identity. Wellcome Collection
There is a huge amount of enthralling information in here. Following on from the “Twins” room I learned about Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who invented the concept of eugenics; the self-perception of actress Fiona Shaw; the life of April Ashley, born George Jamieson and the first person in the UK to undergo gender reassignment; and the photographer Claude Cahun, once imprisoned on Nazi-occupied Jersey, whose self-portraits deliberately present numerous opposing images of herself.
All the rooms are carefully researched to show visitors a rounded human being and invite debate on whether the “exhibits” would see themselves in the way they are portrayed here.
The room celebrating Sir Alec Jeffreys, DNA profiling pioneer, is particularly interesting in this respect.
Sir Alec believes all that is important about him can be gained from looking at his DNA – the curators have gathered together books, school reports and sporting trophies, a copy of The Beano in which one of his drawings is published and personal CDs.
A "hereafter mirror" takes delayed footage of gallery-goers. Wellcome Collection
This juxtaposition allows the visitor to make their own mind up as to who Sir Alec is – the sum of his DNA or the boy who achieved that cycling proficiency certificate.
The Wellcome Trust has procured the latest Big Brother diary room chair for the last space – identity as portrayed through diaries.
Who are diaries for? Are they genuinely personal, or are the majority manipulated for public consumption? Do we, for example, know the real Samuel Pepys, or the real Tony Benn? Benn edits his own diaries, we are told, and later editions of Pepys (on display) demonstrate selective editing.
On one wall between rooms is the “hereafter mirror”, which takes delayed film of whoever walks past, playing it back a few seconds later to show viewers how they look to other people. There are some aspects of this exhibition that are not for the insecure.
Identity does not set out to answer its own questions. It is not an exhibition that offers any conclusions, and visitors shouldn’t hope for any. It is, however, an absorbing and thoughtful study of human nature which should inspire visitors to think about who they are, and how they form ideas of other people.
Visit the exhibition online for programme of accompanying events.
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