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12 results
  • Article
  • Article

The birth of the public museum

| Elissavet Ntoulia

The first public museums evolved from wealthy collectors’ cabinets of curiosities and were quickly recognised as useful vehicles for culture.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Inside the mind of George Vasey, co-curator of Misbehaving Bodies

| Gwendolyn SmithThomas S G Farnetti

Discover how curator George Vasey honoured the approaches of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, who mischievously subvert clichés around illness and death.

  • Article
  • Article

A symbol of a lost homeland

| Yasmeen Abdel MajeedJacqueline Reem Salloum

The story of one protective amulet from Palestine reveals a complex tale. Encompassing the personal history of an influential doctor and collector, it provides a window onto dispossession and exile, and the painful repercussions that are still felt today.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Inside the minds of Teeth’s two curators, James Peto and Emily Scott-Dearing

| Gwendolyn Smith

James Peto and Emily Scott-Dearing talk visceral reactions, their interactions and object extractions.

  • Article
  • Article

The life and death of Tamagotchi and the virtual pet

| Jenna Jovi

Discover how the 1990s craze for Tamagotchis became a flood of robotic and virtual pets, sending their owners on an emotional rollercoaster ride.

  • Article
  • Article

How music opens the doors of memory and the mind

| Philip Ball

People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?

  • Article
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Mask, ritual and fertility

| Chimwemwe PhiriSteven Pocock

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

  • Article
  • Article

How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

| James Wilkes

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

  • Article
  • Article

The painter, the psychiatrist and a fashion for hysteria

| Natasha Ruiz-GómezKathleen Arundell

A dramatic painting brings a famous event in medical history alive. But it also tells a tale about the health preoccupations of the time.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Meet the climate emergency

| Gwendolyn SmithThomas S G Farnetti

Find out what led Yinka Shonibare to create the compelling artwork ‘Refugee Astronaut’.

  • Article
  • Article

Cocaine, the Victorian wonder drug

| Douglas SmallBenjamin Gilbert

Today, cocaine has a very poor public image as one of the causes of crime and violence. But for the Victorians it was welcomed as the saviour of modern surgery.

  • Article
  • Article

Picturing mental health

| Lalita KaplishSolomon Szekir-Papasavva

Ron Hampshire created artworks while resident at Netherne psychiatric hospital. What can we learn from them?