One was in the former Reading Room, a space I'd always loved. They'd taken advantage of the ambience for an exhibit titled Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the 18th century. To quote their intro, "The Enlightenment was an age of reason and learning that flourished across Europe and America from about 1680 to 1820. This rich and diverse permanent exhibition uses thousands of objects to demonstrate how people in Britain understood their world during this period."
The "Religion and Ritual" section showed Maya, Egyptian, and Buddhist deities all chumming together. It was an interesting display, almost like open storage but it relied on a lot of text to make sense of the juxtapositions and I noticed that few visitors were reading labels; most just grazed one or two and moved on.
For more info, click here
The other cross-cultural exhibit was less ambitious but seemed to be easier on visitors: "Living and Dying" in the Wellcome Trust Gallery. From their intro: "People throughout the world deal with the tough realities of life in many different ways. The displays in Room 24 explore different approaches to our shared challenges as human beings, focussing on how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being. "
The center piece of the gallery was a contemporary artwork, "Cradle to Grave", incorporating a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man. To see a detail, click here.
While I'm not usually a fan of contemporary art, this was very attention-catching and led people to spend time looking at the other exhibits that made up the gallery, some of which are shown below. It probably helped that it was fairly light on text.
No comments:
Post a Comment