curation

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind. The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870. Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes […]

The upcoming one-day conference ‘Curating Science’ at Kingston University in London on 6 May — bringing together curators and communicators from museums, galleries and new sites of engagement to explore the role of science in the exhibition — looks sort of interesting Intersections in Art, Science and Society: Nicola Triscott, Director, The Arts Catalyst Turning […]

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, […]

Martha Fleming, who was head curator on our award-winning exhibition Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine (2009-2010) will speak at the Danish Royal Academy of Art on Friday 1 April. The title of her talk is “Museum as Material, Exhibition as Scholarly Publication”. What does it mean to consider an institution to be a […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

We got this cuddly edition of the malaria parasite from Marco Herbst who was here visiting the museum last week, to get inspiration for his upcoming Malaria Museum in Berlin. Marco’s approach to making a museum was refreshingly nontraditional. Far from being webbed up in museological concepts and theories, he builds on a growing fascination […]

This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together. The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about […]

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference. Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time […]

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’. Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to […]

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on […]