senses

Alive I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina. This […]

Here’s the final (and somewhat extended) call for presentations at the workshop ‘The Sensuous Object to be held at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 29-30 September, 2011 ‘The Sensuous Object’ is an interdisciplinary, participatory workshop concerned with ways we actually engage with objects and aimed at researchers in all disciplines interested in the materiality of actual […]

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items. Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was […]

Our own Lucy Lyons and Anette Stenslund are organising a two-day workshop titled ‘The Sensuous Object’ here at Medical Museion, September 29-30. ‘The Sensuous Object’ is an interdisciplinary, participatory workshop concerned with ways we actually engage with objects and aimed at researchers in all disciplines interested in the materiality of actual artefacts and ways of […]

Two weeks ago, I attended a one-day conference in Copenhagen entitled ”The City is the Machine: Sociological and Architectural Perspectives on Spaces of the City, Materiality and Sociality” (orig.: “Byen er maskinen: Sociologiske og arkitektoniske perspektiver på byens rum, materialitet og socialitet”). The panel of speakers comprised two architects, a literary theorist and three sociologists, […]

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the […]

Ugh! Last week I visited New York. What really spoke to my senses and touched my emotions in a provocative and morbid way was a toe-curling exhibition of works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. To be honest the works on display managed to freak me out […]