Ways of Seeing Ourselves: Visions of human embodiment from Hunter to today

Ways of Seeing Ourselves: Visions of human embodiment from Hunter to today

This exhibition discussion event and film screening will see artists and curators explore ideas of human embodiment from the Enlightment to today.

Wednesday, 28th November 2018 at 5:15pm
Hunterian Art Gallery

Event description


This discussion event explores some of the connections between two current Hunterian exhibitions William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum, a comprehensive survey of Hunter’s collections, which range from anatomy to zoology, and Strange Foreign Bodies, a group exhibition featuring works by seven leading contemporary artists.

Dr Nicky Reeves (Curator of Scientific and Medical History Collections, The Hunterian) will discuss 17th/18th-century conceptions of vision, as exemplified by Hunter’s dissections of the human eyeball, and will reflect also on optical technologies like microscopes and telescopes which function as prosthetic, even cyborgian, extensions of human vision.

Artist Phillip Warnell (Associate Professor and Director of Studies on MA Experimental Film, Kingston University, London) will discuss his 2009 film Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies, a collaboration with renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy which explores human and animal embodiment in the light of contemporary medical technologies, including those by which Nancy himself received a heart transplant. The event will also include a screening of Warnell’s The Girl with X-ray Eyes (2008, 23 minutes), whose protagonist Natasha Demkina is a medical doctor and faith practitioner who claims to be able to see directly inside of bodies using a supplementary, penetrative form of vision.

The event will be chaired by the curator of Strange Foreign Bodies, Dr Dominic Paterson, and is followed by a wine reception.

Images: Phillip Warnell, The Girl with X-ray Eyes (2008, 23 minutes). Phillip Warnell, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009).


See other events organized by The Hunterian Book Now
Event booking system powered by Bookitbee.com

© 2024 LIVE IT Group Ltd, Registered in England & Wales, number 08432364 at 7 Bell Yard, London WC2A 2JR
LIVE IT is a technology partner providing ticket fulfilment services and is not an agent for this event or affiliated with its organizers in any way.