4 September – 15 December, 2009 (~60 sq.m., in Medical Museion’s satellite exhibition area, Blegdamsvej 3A)
This temporary exhibition was curated by Thomas Söderqvist for the Faculty of Health Sciences in connection with the opening of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Protein Research and funded independently from this project by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. While “Split+Splice” grew out of a research project, “Primary Substances” will hopefully some time in the future give rise to a research project (on the contemporary material and visual history of protein research), which in turn will hopefully give rise to a larger exhibition on the history of proteins. The exhibition involved a large number of researchers and companies in the region and thus also served as a model for how exhibition making can be a co-operative effort between historians, museologists, biomedical scientists and the production and marketing departments of private enterprises. In contrast to “Split+Splice”, “Primary Substances” was an attempt to balance between the ‘production of presence’ and the ‘production of meaning’.