Copenhagen Archives | Martha Fleming : arts | sciences

Tag Archive for: Copenhagen

Senior Research Associate, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage

2015/04/01

Senior Research Associate, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage (2015-2016)

AAFH — or ‘Heritage Futures’ — is a flagship four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council in the ‘Care for the Future’ strategic programme. Four interconnected themes, each led by a separate researcher, will ‘explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange across a broad range of heritage and related fields, in partnership with a number of academic and non-academic institutions and interest groups.’

I received a call from Sharon MacDonald in February of 2014, telling me about an exciting large-scale project that she had been developing with other colleagues. The project would explore and recalibrate the collecting and preserving of cultural and natural heritage in all its complex manifestations — material, digital, intangible — in the framework of 21st century social, technological and economic contexts, as well as the environmental shifts of the anthropocene. They were looking for a colleague to join the group as part of the funding bid package, a colleague who had the skills to address and effect inter-institutional and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, and to guide in the formulation of exhibitionary experiments. With my experience of cross-polinating between museum and academia, and my extensive involvement with collecting institutions across the range from natural historical to biological and anatomical, including historical material culture and archival collections, Sharon felt I would be a good fit.

Sharon and I have known each other and each others’ work for many years, crossing paths notably at the Science Museum in the late 1990s, when I was creating Atomism & Animism, and she was researching and writing Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. But this was an opportunity to actually work together for the first time, and I was delighted to accept. As a named researcher on the AHRC Grant Application, my areas of activity are outlined in the Case for Support as ‘Senior Research Assistant (knowledge exchange and cross-disciplinary working)’; facilitating ‘cross-WP KEPWs’, ‘interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, dissemination and impact’, ‘pop-up kiosk exhibitions and overall programme-level exhibition’.

Shortly after the grant was awarded, the full team held a working meeting to get to know each other, our areas of interest, and to explore the overarching links between each others’ research questions. The meeting was held in October 2014 at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, kindly hosted by one of the Co-Investigators, Cornelius Holtorf, who is Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University and Director of the Graduate School in Contract Archaeology.

The project got going in earnest in April 2015, and at our May planning meeting that year I contributed three overview presentations — one concerning exhibition practice and experiments, another concerning virtual research environments for the Team, and a third concerning planning and record-keeping for impact ‘narratives.’ During our workshops, my contributions and critiques concerning controlled vocabularies and metadata, current museum practice, and history-of-science approaches to understanding the move from material to molecular in biological collections were valued.

Over the following year, I produced several proposals for the integration of innovative exhibitionary practices into the field work, research programme, and knowledge exchange events of AAFH, as well as concepts and budgets for flexible pop-up displays that could work as well in public fora as they would in academic contexts. I outlined a number of these proposals in a lecture entitled ‘Ideas on the Move’, at the invitation of the Bikuben Foundation, Denmark, on the occasion of their symposium Considering Exhibitions (National Museum of Denmark, 23 August 2015).

I built a virtual research environment for the Team using Google Drive and tools, so that it was up and running rapidly — and then I restructured and migrated our data into Evernote so that the advantages of Evernote’s tagging and workchat would better support this highly distributed Team. My contributions to the VRE included a list of visual artists whose work and practices would be of value and interest to the Team members — in this way, I introduced them to the work of artists such as Yann Mingard, Bill Burns, Maria Thereza Alvez, Lisa Autogena, and the Boyle Family. I was also able to direct the Team to best practice guidelines in commissioning and working with artists. In the end, the project has mainly focused on filmmaking, with lead Creative Fellow Antony Lyons not only training all five research associates in filmmaking, but also bringing his own subsequent Arts Council Grant to the table.

I also built a quick-and-dirty website to rapidy profile the project online while I drew up a requirements document and spec-sheet for the real thing, researching best-fit designers. The Team went with the creative agency that I had identified — The District (Cambridge) — who have done a great job as you can see on the AAFH website.

As the Heritage Futures project developed, individual projects differentiated themselves and began their unique research trajectories. When I was offered the chance in later 2016 to take up the post of Deputy Director at the V&A Research Institute, where I would be in a position to begin actually experimenting with and operationalising process design in museum future-making, I took it.

Further Links: Sharon MacDonald, Humboldt Professor; Antony Lyons, Filmmaker

[Image References: Svalbard Global Seed Bank Entryway, Norway, by Mari Tefre; Svalbard Global Seed Bank Underground Corridor, by Matthias Heyde; Group Photo, First Team Meeting, Kalmar 2014; IUCN: traditional medicines market, Wolong, China]

Museums as Social Learning Spaces: Denmark

2013/05/13

‘Inclusion and Interdisciplinarity’ at Social Learning Space & Knowledge Producing Processes: the Danish Museums & Galleries User Survey (May 2013)

As part of a group of four international experts, I participated in a week-long tour of Danish Museums which culminated in a two-day conference at the contemporary art museum Arken (13-15 May 2013). Organised by the Danish Government’s Kulturstyrelsen, both the tour and the conference were intended to stimulate practices leading to deeper connections between museums and their visitors, and between the visitors themselves. The other members of the expert group were Lynn Dierking, John Falk, and Amareswar Galla.

My contribution to the conference concerned the direct relationship between innovative museum practice and the quality, quantity and kind of visitors that frequent a museum. I proposed that a robust interdisciplinary process of thinking and working – across museum departments and with outside colleagues – can produce projects that inherently engage new audiences, and engage return audiences at a deeper level than ever before. This is certainly an approach that I have deployed to good effect in my own work – not least in a Danish museum, the Medical Museion of the University of Copenhagen.

Each of us four keynote speakers had been paired with a Danish museum: my ‘twin’ for the conference was Naturama, a relatively new and successful visitor attraction that has been built up from an historically significant collection of Danish natural history specimens – The Svendborg Zoologiske Museum.

I was able to bring together knowledge garnered while I was working at the Natural History Museum (London) and research being effected in animal studies arenas, alongside groundbreaking exhibition projects by artists such as Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson and others, in order to propose some concrete ways in which Naturama – and indeed other natural history museums – can work with their collections to think differently and anew about both nature and visitors.

The Kulturstyrelsen (Danish Agency for Culture) has uploaded to their YouTube channel the video documents made of this and the other presentations at the conference, and it makes really informative viewing. The shift from a focus on project to a focus on process is an important one, and I was impressed by the range and number of delegates to the conference. Over 200 museum professionals attended, and participated in four short workshops devised by the speakers with a view to developing practical tools and strategies to galvanise the their spaces, collections, colleagues and websites into dynamic nodes of social exchange and knowledge production.

The attendees represent the 200 museums and galleries in Denmark that participate every year in the production of a User Survey. Museum visitor surveys and evaluation practices have become ubiquitous, but the design of the questions and the use of the data is rarely as interesting as in the 2012 Danish Kulturstyrelsen Survey and conference. This past year, the survey included a series of questions designed by lifelong learning specialist John Falk (also one of the expert group for the tour and conference) to explore learning styles and visitor motivations far beyond number-and-type demographics.

The outcome is a revelation. Far from the market segmentation of the usual visitor survey, Falk’s approach gives a sense of continuity between visitors and non-visitors, why and how, thoughts and feelings, meeting place and head-space. Outlined in the User Survey publication – which also includes a more traditional, 20th century-style overview of the visitor to Danish Museums – Falk’s approach offers a dynamic set of working propositions for fostering great partnerships between museums and people.

The publication also includes an inspiring introduction by Ida Brændholt Lundgaard, the Kulturstyrelsen’s Senior Adviser for Museums, and her assistant Jacob Thorek Jensen. Danes are not afraid of philosophy, and the introduction is refreshingly coherent in relation to the phenomenological aspects of the museum experience as well as a careful analysis of visitor metrics. It was Ida and Jacob who also organised our tour of Danish museums which preceded the conference.

Over a number of days, they took me, Lynn, John and Amar to see the following museums and meet with their directors and staff to discuss learning partnerships in museum contexts.

Kunsten, Museum of Modern Art (Aalborg)
Skagen Museum (Skagen)
Michael and Anna Anchers House (Skagen)
Museum Jorn (Silkeborg)
Den Gamle By Open Air Museum (Aarhus)
Royal Jelling Monument (Jelling)
Naturama (Svendborg)
Roskilde Cathedral Heritage Site (Roskilde)
Viking Ship Museum (Roskilde)
Copenhagen City Museum (Copenhagen)

Along the way, we walked in heritage landscapes such as Grenen Strand and the palisades built by Harald Bluetooth in the 900s. We also saw ports and countryside, agricultural histories and seafaring, fishing histories carved into the coast and the loam. This too is highly significant cultural heritage and the interplay with museum and gallery presentation is both subtle and deep. What the trip from Skagen to Svendborg and across to Copenhagen meant was that by the time the ‘expert group’ stood at the podium to present our papers at the conference, we had a much more deeply nuanced sense of the integrity of Danish cultural life and museum practice than would have been imagined even a week before.*

I hope that our visit, so beautifully hosted by the Danish Cultural Agency and the generous museums we visited, has returned this hospitality with useful and inspiring thoughts. Museums and their collections of all kinds have extraordinary potential to radically improve well-being, social cohesion, levels of common knowledge, skills for life, and the capacity for reflection.

My lecture has been videocast by the Danish Kulturstyrelsen on their YouTube Channel. The entire conference can be accessed through the Kulturstyrelsen Museums Department website.

Further Links: Danish Kulturstyrelsen Museums Development Department; Naturama; Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson; Amareswar Galla and the Inclusive Museum; John Falk; Lynn Dierking

[Image References: Conference Plenary at Arken in May 2013; Thomas Block Ravn speaking to the visiting expert group at the open air museum Den Gamle By, of which he is the Director; panorama of the land-based animal specimens on display at Naturama; the reconstruction of Brøndum’s dining room at the Skagen Museum]

* Over my years of visiting and working in Denmark, I had already attended a raft of other extraordinary museums: Silkeborg Museum and Tollund Man; Moesgaard Museum and Graubelle Man; Brandts Building including the Media Museum; Danish National Museum Copenhagen; Museum of the Danish Resistance; Lyngby Open Air Museum; Brede Werk; Natural History Museum, including the Botanical Gardens and the Geological Musem; Faergegarden Museum; Louisiana Museum; Theatre Museum; National Archives; Royal Library; Royal Danish Arsenal Museum; Danish Museum of Art & Design; National Art Gallery; Rosenborg Castle; Danish Architecture Centre; Danish Design Centre

Split + Splice

2009/06/11

Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine, Exhibition Creative Director, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (2008 to 2009)

Creation and production of this Dibner Award winning show about contemporary biomedicine; leading a team of four post-doctoral medical historians and social scientists, an exhibition designer and a graphic designer; interpreting the Museum’s collections; co-editing the exhibition catalogue.

Following on directly from my position as Visiting Associate Professor, Medical Museion commissioned me as Creative Director of the main exhibition outcome of their Novo Nordisk Foundation funded research project, ‘Biomedicine on Display.’ That was the short name for the five-year long project led by Museion Director, Professor Thomas Soderqvist: “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine.”

I worked closely with a small team of highly accomplished post-docs who had never created an exhibition before, teaching them how to think through objects and how to use objects to clearly convey abstract concepts — far more complex and rewarding than the ‘story-telling’ often advocated for science museums.

My wonderful co-curators were Dr Susanne Bauer, Dr Søren Bak-Jensen, Dr Sniff Andersen Nexø and Dr Jan Eric Olsén. Their research interests ranged from epidemiological practices with data to organ transplant networks and techniques; from IVF developments and law to medical visualisation techniques & their impacts. So I learned as much from them as they learned from me. Their research, while aiming at close histories of biomedical research, also already drew on scholarship of material and visual culture.

From the outset we decided that we would build the exhibition up from their research interests, and not from any encyclopedic or public expectation of what an exhibition about contemporary biomedicine ought to contain. In our early Exhibition Brief we expressed our aims:

The core aim of the exhibition is to facilitate visitors’ informed reflections upon the ways in which recent biomedicine challenges significant cultural categories including the body and identity, therefore influencing our very understanding of ourselves as human beings: our sense of “personhood.”

As I further outlined later at the September 2009 conference of the Artefacts Group, convened at the Science Museum, London:

We wanted to take the visitor beyond the ‘user end’ of biomedicine and into its engine room, and experiment with innovative ways of bringing some of the big ‘invisibles’ of biomedical practice to a larger public. Questions of samples and storage, data generation and management, the integration of analytical instruments with research and clinical bureaucracies, the legal frameworks of biomedicine were all on our agenda. We wanted to address the social, political and cultural enormities of contemporary biomedicine without losing sight of the historical. As historians and epistemologists, we did not want to teach people the science, but rather to teach people how to think about science; to think about how bodies are contingent, flexible, fluid, resilient; how materials, tools and instruments have a history; how conditions for the production of medical knowledge change over time.*

Of course, taking seriously these sorts of epistemological questions has a huge effect on the final appearance of an exhibition — just as taking aesthetic questions seriously means confronting the philosophical issues that material culture presents. Medical Museion’s position as a university museum integrated with a Faculty of Health was crucial to the exhibition’s success: the involvement of biomedical researchers and clinicians in the project was integral to the research projects the post-docs ran.

Split + Splice (in Danish, Del + Hel), was about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living. The exhibition explored these complexities through the material culture, objects and instruments used by biomedical practitioners in research and in clinical activities.

We showed the visitor biomedicine’s Cold Rooms, its Wet Labs, its number crunching, its visualisation practices. Its incubators and ion exchange columns. Its legislative constraints and its media leaks. We took them into some of the historical origins of biomedicine’s process of fragmenting the body into smaller and smaller pieces. We came to the conclusion that all of biomedical practice is a never-ending attempt to contain the torrent of life and manage the flows of this cascade of complexity from biosample to dataset, from clinic to lab, from individual to populace. These practices of containment and flow tell us much about the cultures of biomedicine and the kinds of societies that its practices produce.

Much as biomedicine itself, Split + Splice was an innovative hybridisation of complex practices. It was not exactly science communication; it did not teach the visitor comprehensively about the field of biomedicine. Neither did it show a triumphalist progression of miraculous discovery. Split + Splice was not about the magic bullet, but rather the minutiae of biomedicine’s daily practice — and its implications.

If the sheer knife of a microtome can give us the startling and strange histological slice of tissue that revealed the neuron to Ramon y Cajal for the first time, then we must also be able to wield with equal precision what we know about aesthetics to reveal vital information about the cultures that made the objects under scrutiny; here we investigated the prosaic but fundamental way that both plastics and computing have revolutionised medicine. Under a humanities microscope, epistemological investigations of the ritual and often hypnotically repetitive practices of biomedicine can reveal, among other things, the social assumptions that often underpin disease prediction.

In Split + Splice we used different techniques from the arts, the sciences and the humanities as prisms to analyse the same material in several ways. The exhibition’s ‘catalogue’ User Manual is also the object index for the entire show: a gift to the visitor to take away and keep, but also something that set the objects free from text, allowing them to be discovered in their form and materiality by the visitor.

The User Manual was edited by me and Søren Bak-Jensen, but the concept was collective and many of the contributions were made by our co-curators and by the indefatigable Head of Collections, Ion Meyer. It was beautifully designed by Lars Møller Nielsen to sit in the hand, fit in the pocket and be an exhibition guide that felt like a set of instructions for a new bit of kit. After all, an exhibition is a ‘technology’ too.

We were lucky to have been able to work with Lars, and with the excellent exhibition designer Mikael Thorsted, whose experience, intellectual capacity and formal ingenuity were essential features of the exhibition’s success.

And it was very successful: in 2010 Split + Splice won the coveted Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits of the Society for the History of Technology — the only international award in the world for science museum exhibitions. It was the first time the prize was won by a medical history museum, and the first time it was won by a Scandinavian museum. The following is a quotation from the Prize Citation:

This exhibition offered the visitor a ‘fantastic voyage’ of inquiry through the cultures, objects and practices of medicine now and then, in a revolutionary exhibition format.

Catching the visitors’ attention with original, well-designed, interactive and playful displays, it provided fragmentary impressions of biomedical research. Furthermore, it encouraged the visitor to think beyond the practices of research by alluding to or highlighting broader impacts of biomedical practices on society and parallel developments in culture. Room labels such as “Avalanches of Data,” “Reality Show,” and “Mass Observation” hinted at crucial developments within biomedicine while raising questions in the User Manual.

Split + Splice represents a new paradigm of the exhibition that should inspire others to rethink how they explain or experience the actions of the boxes and containers that affect — if not define — us all.

It is this ‘new paradigm of the exhibition’ as a field of research practice that I find most exciting, and which is, to me, the greatest honour of the Dibner Award to Split + Splice. Increasingly there is a sense of the importance and uniqueness of exhibition-making as a scholarly activity — from the Artefacts Group, from conferences such as The Exhibition as a Product and Generator of Knowledge, and in the most recent Presidential communication from the History of Science Society.

Working with objects and with display techniques is a serious pursuit that opens whole new fields of understanding and inquiry. Split + Splice was an international collaboration across countries and languages, involving interdisciplinary practice from labs and libraries to design and fine art. Bringing current science practice together with cutting edge history and philosophy of medicine as well as innovation in musem practice produced an amazing result. I look forward to further such productive opportunities.

USER MANUAL Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine, Martha Fleming and Søren Bak-Jensen, editors. Copenhagen: Medical Museion, 2009 (catalogue in English and Danish).

* My article based on this presentation will be published in Artefacts, Volume 9: Analyzing Art and Aesthetics, Smithsonian Institute Press (2013). The Artefacts Group is an association of historians of science working mainly in museums who share the belief that the use of objects is essential to serious historical study in the field.

Further Links: Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen; Split + Splice on the Corporeality Blog; The Artefacts Group; Lars Møller Nielsen; Mikael Thorsted; The Dibner Award; Lynn Nyhart’s address in HSS Newsletter; Full Flickr Slideshow of Split + Splice

[Image References: all images are of the exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine and its User Manual catalogue, with the exception of the image in the middle of this page, which is of a 96 well clear plastic microplate designed and produced by Thermo Fisher Scientific]

Visiting Professor, Faculty of Health, Copenhagen

2006/09/15

Visiting Associate Professor, Faculty of Health, University of Copenhagen: Medical Museion (2006 – 2007)

Working as part of the research team ‘Biomedicine on Display,’ I helped to develop the Art and Biomedicine research stream at the Medical Museion. This included the development and programming of a 30-person international interdisciplinary workshop entitled Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context (with Dr Jan-Eric Olsén and PI Professor Director Thomas Soderqvist) as well as a day-long symposium in collaboration with the Royal Danish Art Academy: Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body.

My Visiting Professorship at Museion contributed to the research direction of ‘Biomedicine on Display’ in the run-up to the exhibition Split + Splice, for which I was subsequently made Creative Director. ‘Biomedicine on Display’ was the short name for the five-year long project, funded by Novo Nordisk and led by Professor Soderqvist: “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine”

Professor Soderqvist invited me to be involved because of my highly innovative exhibition practice, coupled with experience of working with scientists and a knowledge of both history of science and of the inner workings of museums. The main research events that I was involved in producing jointly with Professor Soderqvist and post-doc Dr Jan-Eric Olsen were as follows.

‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’ — a closed international workshop (August 30 – September 1 2007, Medical Museion, Copenhagen). Over 30 participants were involved in this intensive event that involved pre-circulated papers and a very open mind. These are the issues we met to address:

The aim of this closed workshop is to help forge new strategies of making sense of and presenting recent biomedicine in museums, especially taking into account the unique difficulties of rendering visible material biomedical practices in their social, cultural, political, aesthetic and scientific complexity.

The workshop will bring together key practitioners from a range of methodological approaches, including artists with a firm understanding of biomedical practice, museologists and material culture scholars, historians of science, art historians and aestheticians, biomedical practitioners with a knowledge of contemporary bioart, and visualisation specialists.

The conjuncture of biomedicine and aesthetics is a rapidly growing field of artistic practice and academic reflection, dealing with an array of issues, from the public engagement with current biomedicine to methodological overlaps between the practices of artists and laboratory researchers. Museums are key institutions for this hybrid field of inquiry.

A sense of the specific issues we were trying to unpick can be garnered from my article (for both the Museion Blog and its Yearly Report) entitled The Huge Invisibles. The list of attendees included Ken Arnold (Wellcome Trust); David Edwards (Harvard/Le Laboratoire); Anke te Heesen (now of Humboldt-Universität); Sharon MacDonald (University of Manchester); Arthur Olsen (Scripps Research Institute); Claire Pentecost (School of the Arts Institute Chicago), Miriam van Rijsingen (University of Amsterdam), Calum Storrie (London), Richard Wingate (Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King’s College, London), and more.

We also commissioned, with the help of Danish curator Stine Hebert, the highly accomplished sound artist, Jacob Kirkegaard, to make a work for the event. His Labyrinthitis, which was premiered at Museion in the old operating theatre on 2 September 2007, has gone on to be presented in many other contexts, and has been produced as a recording by Touch Music.

Following hot on the heels of the Workshop and the premiere of Labyrinthitis, we moved — quite literally — down the street to the Royal Danish Art Academy for the public part of the research proceedings, the conference Beyond the Body. This was a collaboration with the Schools of Visual Art, and Rector Mikkel Bogh was our host and partner for the day. It was wonderful to be able to go from one seat of learning to another, from medicine to fine art, both housed in 18th century buildings, as 21st century interdisciplinary practitioners. Several hundred people were waiting for us at the Art Academy.

They day was organised into sessions of course, and it was possible to immediately transfer to a public arena some of the discussions we had had in the closed Workshop in the preceding days. Among those who spoke, and whom I have not yet mentioned above, were Ben Fry (data visualisation designer); Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble); Ingeborg Reichle (Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften); and James Elkins (E.C. Chadbourne Chair, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago).*

Medical Museion is one of several museums of the University of Copenhagen, and its collections span some 300 years of medical history. Nestled within the Faculty of Health, which also encompasses the Panum Research and Teaching Institute, a dozen Teaching Hospitals including the Royal Hospital, and the dazzling new Proteomics Centre, the Medical Museion connects a large network of cutting edge health practitioners to the history, origins and critique of medicine today.

As a research institute in history and philosophy of medicine, Museion is not alone in the Faculty of Health. Indeed, it is overseen by the Institute of Public Health, whose social scientists regularly contribute to Museion’s intellectual programme. What is unusual about it is that the primary sources for this research institute are collection objects, not solely archives and texts.

Director Thomas Soderqvist was appointed to Museion a decade ago, and has made of it a research-intensive institution which has welcomed some highly innovative researchers — including me.

“By focusing on integration between research, collecting, education and dissemination beyond the Museum world, the Medical Museion will go beyond the traditional division between universities as pure research-and-teaching units, and museums which are primarily collection and dissemination institutions.” Vision Statement, Medical Museion

Of course, all university museums have this potential, and all museums effect intensive research into their collections in ways that are not yet fully acknowledged as such — cataloguing collections of material culture requires a level of interdisciplinary skill that few academics can even imagine, for example. What’s special about Museion is that an attempt is being made to look both ways. It’s something that could not be done without agile and highly skilled collections management and conservation — Museion is lucky to have Ion Meyer as Head of Collections, one of the most accomplished conservators of organic material working today, and a consummate museum professional.

Another thing that’s special about Museion is that it is paying close attention to the history of medicine of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s hard enough for medical practitioners to keep up, let alone a museum — but the skills of medical historians, philosophers and social scientists can make a major contribution to self-reflexivity on the part of those practitioners, and to public understanding and engagement with the huge issues brought up by rapidly advancing biotechnology.

One of the main aims of my post was to create an arena in which a group of highly skilled post-doctoral researchers in history of contemporary biomedicine could collaboratively conceptualise, and then actually make, an exhibition – a project entirely new to them, and for which they had no prior training. Exhibition-making is both an intellectual methodology engaging with material culture and a pragmatic, technically complex task — not for the faint-hearted.

I developed a programme and syllabus to teach these humanities post-doctoral students how to think about – and how to think through – the material culture of their field, and then how to actually make a real exhibition to a defined deadline. Though this was technically post-doctoral supervision of a kind, I certainly learned as much from them as they learned from me — and together we went on to produce an exhibition so successful it won the 2010 Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits of the Society for the History of Technology against stiff international competition from much larger and better resourced institutions. That exhibition was Split + Splice — its co-curators with me were Dr Susanne Bauer; Dr Søren Bak-Jensen; Dr Sniff Andersen Nexø; Dr Jan Eric Olsén; and, until spring of 2008, Hanne Jessen.

*An archive of all three events over the five-day period can be found on the University of Copenhagen’s Biocampus website: they part-funded the events as well. Smaller events were no less important in the work of that year — Museion also received Jens Hauser and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.

Further Links: Medical Museion; Jacob Kirkegaard, Labyrinthitis; Royal Danish Art Academy; Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits

[Image References: detail of flyer for Art and Biomedicine; a lab desktop at the Proteomics Centre with a pair of dolls distributed by Eppendorf; Jacob Kirkegaard working on Labyrinthitis in the Medical Museion operating theatre]