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How to play in a museum
Some museums create games for visitors to play. In others, if you’re creative and inquisitive, you can make up your own. Find out how a game can give you a different perspective on art and objects.
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Performance art, frozen in time
For over a year, live performance art with an audience present has been largely impossible. But still images continue to allow artists in this sphere to inspire audiences at home.
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Is fake news killing fictive art?
Parafictional artists create projects where the imaginary interacts with real life. But the growth of so-called ‘fake news’ is providing a new challenge.
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The intimate and invasive art of ethical taxidermy
Does displaying dead animals bring us closer to nature, or drive us further apart?
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A virtual view of history
Step inside Anne Frank’s house or explore the galleries in a museum destroyed by fire. VR brings history and art satisfyingly close when we’re unable to get there in person.
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How electromagnetic therapy inspired me
Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.
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A brief history of tattoos
The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.
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Notes upon arrival
In an effort to feel at home back in the country of her birth, poet Bhanu Kapil recognises the small revelations of nature in a chilly UK spring as a way to reconnect.
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Care, creativity and a connected world
Find out about the challenges Wellcome Collection has faced during the last very demanding year.
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Inside the minds of Teeth’s two curators, James Peto and Emily Scott-Dearing
James Peto and Emily Scott-Dearing talk visceral reactions, their interactions and object extractions.
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Unravelling genetic origins from the potato to cinchona
Starting with the humble potato, Nataly Allasi Canales reveals how researchers unearth the genetic origins of modern plant varieties, and explains why their work is so important for biodiversity.
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Race, religion and the Black Madonna
Mystery and controversy surround the dark-skinned religious icon who represents the Virgin Mary throughout the Catholic world.
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Political brilliance and the power of self-promotion
How do you convince people you’re exceptional? Meet the ultimate self-styled genius.
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The extraordinary body of Evatima Tardo
Darling of 19th-century American freak shows, Evatima Tardo remained serene as she withstood crucifixion and the bites of poisonous snakes. But she took the secret behind her abilities to her grave.
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Louis Wain’s cryptic cats
Once famous for his quirky cat illustrations, today Louis Wain is often portrayed as a ‘psychotic’ artist whose illness can be mapped out through his drawings. Here Bryony Benge-Abbott takes a more rounded view.
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The painter, the psychiatrist and a fashion for hysteria
A dramatic painting brings a famous event in medical history alive. But it also tells a tale about the health preoccupations of the time.
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Meet the climate emergency
Find out what led Yinka Shonibare to create the compelling artwork ‘Refugee Astronaut’.
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This is what changed my approach to interior design
An interior designer examines how emotions and cognitive activity influenced her designs, and argues that spaces reflect the people within.
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The power of unicorns
Discover the unlikely connection between pharmaceuticals and unicorns.
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Transforming the decorative into dissent
Discover how embroidered messages by two ‘troublesome’ women in 19th-century asylums are mirrored in the therapeutic quilting work of writer Rachel May.
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Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination
The Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are part of our collective cultural memory, but the Spanish flu outbreak has not been.
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Divining the world through an artist’s almanac
Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.
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Inside the mind of George Vasey, co-curator of Misbehaving Bodies
Discover how curator George Vasey honoured the approaches of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, who mischievously subvert clichés around illness and death.
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Dial ‘S’ for sex
In pre-internet days, phone boxes became a patchwork of ‘tart cards’ offering sexual services. Find out about the clandestine world they hint at.
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Homes for the hives of industry
By building workers’ villages, industry titans demonstrated both philanthropy and control. Employees’ health improved, while rulebooks told them how to live ideal lives.