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).