Watch a recording of writer and researcher Dr Bonnie Evans in this online event looking at the origins of film-making at the turn of the 20th century and how this led to a new form of neurodiverse cinema only now being rediscovered. 

Through film clips and photos, Bonnie explores how this work has transformed how we think about difference, and the ways it continues to offer new perspectives on humanity in all its forms.

Dr Bonnie Evans is a lecturer at Queen Mary University and author of 'The metamorphosis of autism: A history of child development in Britain'. She  completed her PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, in 2010. Following that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College, London's Centre for Medical Humanities, working on a project entitled ‘Cultural and Historical Influences on Psychiatric Diagnoses’.

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Dr Bonnie Evans

Speaker

<p>A chance to hear about and talk about ideas with others.</p>

Discussion

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This event is British Sign Language interpreted. An interpreter will be embedded in the event stream/visible to all attendees and will interpret what is discussed into BSL for d/Deaf, hard of hearing and deafened attendees.

British Sign Language

Join Dr Bonnie Evans as she explores the origins of film-making at the turn of the 20th century and how this led to the rediscovery of a new form of neurodiverse cinema.

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The viewing room at Wellcome Collection

Hear from researchers and Wellcome Collection staff about the stories that they unearthed in our collections, and take a closer look at some of the items they discovered.

Library Insights

Film and Neurodiversity

Watch a recording of artist Es Morgan and The Place’s Artist Development Producer Amy Bell in conversation as they talk about Es’s new work, ‘to feel something tipping’. 

The work, a dance film broadcast live in a continuous loop, explores trans embodiment, visibility, being with others and being alone. 

Es and Amy share the work, and then discuss the ideas behind it and the process of making. 

Located in the heart of London, The Place is a creative powerhouse for dance development that is leading the way in dance training, creation and performance. It is uniquely placed to enhance the sector’s ability to support independent dance artists. It provides the space and conditions they need to take the creative risks that keep the art form alive, and help them attain greater profile and integration within the UK and European dance communities. 

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The Place

theplace.org.uk

Partner

Amy (they/them) is a London-based dance artist and producer. Their work, including performing, making, writing, curating, facilitating and dramaturgical practices, is borne of binary-busting fervour. They aim to explode “them-and-us” thinking around embodiment, queerness, marginalisation and relationships between audiences, artists and organisations. Amy’s solo works ‘TOMBO(Y)LA’ and the award-winning ‘The Forecast’ and have toured internationally, and their teaching and facilitation includes working with queer collectives in Cearà, Brazil as well as with professionals and young artists across the UK. Amy is currently Artist Development Producer at The Place, where they also curate ‘Splayed’, an international festival of disruptive queer performance and digital art. 

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Amy Bell

Host

Es Morgan (they/them) is an artist, performer and producer from East Yorkshire whose practices draw from diverse interests in dance, live art and writing. They make performances for theatres, clubs, galleries, screens and pages. These works emerge in response to an array of interests: transgender theory, post-work futures, poetry, tarot and far-left politics, funnelled through their shifting experiences of intimacy, desire and longing. Their work has been presented at, among others, The Place, the Yard Theatre, Nottdance, tanzhaus nrw, the Marlborough Theatre, La Fête du slip (Lausanne), Vivid Projects (Birmingham), and Vogue Fabrics Dalston.

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Es Morgan

Artist

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This event will have live speech-to-text transcription which may be useful for people who are D/deaf, hard of hearing, deafened or neurodiverse. The text will be embedded in the event video window and ticketholders will also receive a link to open subtitles in a separate window.

Speech-to-text

The host and speakers will describe themselves and key visual elements they refer to, which may be useful for blind, partially sighted and neurodiverse attendees. There will not be a separate audio description track.

Audio described

Join choreographer Es Morgan and dance artist Amy Bell in conversation as they talk about Es’s new work, ‘to feel something tipping’.

Es Morgan in Conversation With Amy Bell

Watch a recording of poet and artist Khairani Barokka and curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz for this conversation about Khairani’s new work ‘[Molekuler]’.  

This new work consists of poetry and images that weave together narratives from headlines, histories and personal experiences during the pandemic. ‘[Molekuler]’ critiques the notion of what was ‘hidden’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. Accessibility is creatively woven into the work, with the poems describing the images.  

Bárbara and Khairani talk about the making of the work and explore intertwined stories, from colonial legacies to today’s health inequities. Khairani also reads extracts from the work alongside sharing some of the images. The speakers self-describe and describe visual elements of the event.

‘[Molekuler]’ was commissioned by Wellcome Collection as part of a programme of new artworks for the collection interrogating the impact of the UK government Covid-19 campaign ‘Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives’. 

Khairani Barokka (b. Jakarta, 1985) is a writer, poet and artist in London. She’s a practice-based researcher, whose work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. Among her honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow for her Masters at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), and Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, and is currently Research Fellow at University of the Arts London’s Decolonising Arts Institute, Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (Norwich, UK) and Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation.

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Derrick Kakembo

Khairani Barokka

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz is a curator at Wellcome Collection, London. Her exhibitions include ‘This is a Voice’ (2016), ‘Bedlam’ (co-curated with Mike Jay, 2016), ‘Ayurvedic Man’ (2018), ‘Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies’ (co-curated with George Vasey, 2019 –20) and ‘Un encuentro vegetal’/‘Rooted Beings’ (forthcoming: La Casa Encendida/Wellcome Collection). Bárbara is Guest Editor of the anthology ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH’ (2020). She has written for Afterall, Concreta, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, MARG and Mousse Publishing. She holds a Masters in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.

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Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

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Khairani Barokka in conversation with Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

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Join poet and artist Khairani Barokka and curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz for this conversation about Khairani’s new work ‘[Molekuler]’.

Khairani Barokka in Conversation with Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

Watch a recording of novelist Kate Mosse and palliative care doctor and writer Rachel Clarke in conversation about care, ageing and everyday acts of love.  

Kate discusses her own experience of becoming a carer in middle age, first helping her mother to care for her father, and then supporting her mother through grief after her father’s death.

Through their personal stories, Kate and Rachel offer reflections on the importance of care, and the people who have offered care during the coronavirus pandemic. They ask how we both celebrate older people and value the act of caring, as more of us find ourselves caring for loved ones. 

‘An Extra Pair of Hands: A story of caring, ageing and everyday acts of love’ by Kate Mosse was published by Wellcome Collection on 3 June 2021. 

Kate Mosse is a bestselling novelist, playwright and non-fiction author with sales of more than eight million copies in 38 languages. Renowned for bringing under-heard histories to life, she is a champion of women’s creativity. She is Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, sits on the Executive Committee of Women of the World and is a Visiting Professor of Contemporary Fiction and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. Her novel ‘The City of Tears’ was published in January 2021. 

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Kate Mosse

Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books. ‘Breathtaking’, published in January 2021, reveals what life was really like working on NHS Covid wards during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic last year. ‘Dear Life’, shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and longlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize, is based on her work in a hospice. It explores love, loss, grief, dying and what matters at the end of life. ‘Your Life in My Hands’, published in 2017, documents life as a junior doctor on the NHS frontline. 

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Rachel Clarke

Facilitator

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An extra pair of hands with Kate Mosse. Photo: Kathleen Arundell. Portrait of Kate Mosse © Ruth Crafer

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Join novelist Kate Mosse and palliative care doctor and writer Rachel Clarke in conversation about care, ageing and everyday acts of love.

An Extra Pair of Hands with Kate Mosse and Rachel Clarke

Watch a recording of award-winning novelist and screenwriter Emma Jane Unsworth in this thought-provoking event exploring new motherhood, postnatal depression and recovery.  

Emma is joined by midwife and writer Leah Hazard for an honest and hopeful conversation. Together they tackle the biggest taboos around motherhood and mental health, explore the neuroscience of how pregnancy drastically affects women’s brains, and ask how we can be better prepared for the light and shade of motherhood. 

The conversation weaves both speakers’ personal experiences as mothers with clinical research and Leah’s professional perspective as a midwife. It raises questions about maternal mental health as well as broader issues of society’s attitudes towards motherhood, and what it is to be a woman today. 

Emma Jane Unsworth’s new book ‘After the Storm’ was published on 6 May. It is available as an audiobook.

Emma Jane Unsworth is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her latest novel, ‘Adults’, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her previous novel, ‘Animals’, was adapted into a film, for which Unsworth wrote the screenplay. The film premiered at Sundance 2019 and Unsworth won the award for Best Debut Screenwriter at the British Independent Film Awards that same year. She is a columnist for Grazia magazine and writes a fortnightly column about friendship. She is also writing for television, including a new comedy show for the BBC. 

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Emma Jane Unsworth

@emjaneunsworth on Twitter

@emjaneunsworth on Instagram

Leah Hazard is a midwife, author of the Sunday Times-bestselling memoir ‘Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story’ and host of the podcast ‘What the Midwife Said’, featuring guests such as Lorraine Kelly, Emma Barnett and more. Her writing about women’s health and the need for positive change in our maternity services has appeared in the Observer, The Times, Grazia and more, and she is a frequent commentator on BBC Radio 4 ‘Woman’s Hour’ and across BBC Scotland. Leah’s next book, ‘Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began’, will be published in 2023.

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Leah Hazard

leahhazard.co.uk

@hazard_leah on Twitter

@leahhazard on Instagram

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Postnatal Depression and New Motherhood with Emma Jane Unsworth

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Join award-winning novelist and screenwriter Emma Jane Unsworth for a thought-provoking event exploring new motherhood, postnatal depression and recovery.

Watch a recording of Dr David Griffiths as he explores the recent and contemporary LGBTQI+ histories through Wellcome Collection material, particularly those connected to intersex lives in Britain. 

You will learn about Georgina Somerset, the first intersex woman known to marry in a Church of England church after re-registering her sex. She is also one of the first intersex women in Britain to try to tell her own story in the broadcast media.

Histories of intersex are necessarily entangled with histories of gender and sexuality. They are also often hidden, needing to be excavated from archives such as the Dave King Transgender Archive at Wellcome Collection.  

This talk considers how the LGBTQI+ acronym functions as an umbrella term, and some of the contemporary implications for inclusive politics and human rights.

Dr David Griffiths has a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from the English Department at Cardiff University. He is currently writing a social and medical history on intersex in Britain from the early 20th century at the University of Surrey. 

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Exploring Research Seminar with David Griffiths

Dr David Griffiths

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There will be auto-generated captions for this event. For any assistance, please email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call 020 7611 2222.

Auto-captioned

Join Dr David Griffiths to explore recent and contemporary LGBTQI+ histories through Wellcome Collection material, particularly those connected to intersex lives in Britain.

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Researcher talk in the Viewing Room

Hear from people who have researched our collections, as they share their discoveries. They'll draw on examples from our collections to relate the stories that they've uncovered. And you’ll have a chance to ask them questions afterwards.

Exploring Research

The Entangled Histories of LGBTQI+ Lives in Britain

Join us for a quick cup of coffee and a pastry, afternoon tea, or a light meal with a glass of wine.

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Café

Gallery tour

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Daily Guided Tours and Discussions

This installation featuring five short films explores the question of being human during Covid-19 through poetry and monologues. 

The project was led by 15 young people from Copenhagen Youth Project, and features perspectives drawn from local communities in Caledonian and Barnsbury wards (‘Cally’), accompanied by footage from Black Lives Matter protests. 

The monologues are performed by Moses Gomes-Santos and the poem by Samuel King with background music produced by Armani ‘Amzdatkid’ Malone, an attendee at Copenhagen Youth Project. The production was led by Blanguage.

This project is part of Wellcome Collection’s Youth Programme in partnership with Copenhagen Youth Project.

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What does it mean to be human now? Four views by CYP x CALLY

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Installation

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We’ll be in the Forum. To get there, take the lift or stairs up to level 1 and then follow the signs through the ‘Being Human’ gallery.

The Forum

Four views by CYP x CALLY

Drop in to the Reading Room to take part in artist Oreet Ashery’s project.

Ashery invites you to consider how you feel about your own mental and physical health. Add your response to a growing collection of intimate, moving, funny and frank accounts of health submitted by our visitors. A changing selection of responses will be displayed in the installation over the coming months, opening up the space for shared contemplation.

This project was originally part of Ashery’s recent exhibition at Wellcome Collection, ‘Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery’, which explored lived experiences of care and chronic illness.

Listen to the audio (55 mins, featuring  readers Jordan Ajadi, Alexis De Sousa, Lizzy Le Quesne, and Madinah Thompson).

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Do you consider yourself healthy? Oreet Ashery

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We’ll be in the Reading Room on level 2. You can walk up the spiral staircase to the Reading Room door, or take the lift up and then head left from the Library Desk.

Reading Room

Do you consider yourself healthy?

Take a deeper look at feelings of peace and balance.

Tranquillity brings peace and balance, helping you to reconnect with yourself and your surroundings. There may be a wonderful simplicity to experiencing such calm feelings, but they are complex and difficult to attain. This exhibition offers new commissions that take a deeper look, such as Jasleen Kaur’s playful critique of the wellness industry and Chrystel Lebas’s sublime multisensory tribute to forests and how they affect our health. Historical artefacts, from a régime du corps medieval wellbeing manual to the notebooks that Octavia E Butler used as self-encouragement, show you some of the different ways that individuals pursue moments of tranquillity. 

A family guide for people with children aged 3–11 is available in the gallery.

You will need to book a free ticket to enter the exhibition.

Exhibition highlights

A complete set of gallery captions is available to read online. Large-print captions are also available in the gallery.

Our digital gallery guide for ‘Joy’ and ‘Tranquillity’ features 24 perspectives from medicine, science, religion and poetry, and audio descriptions of some artworks. It is available as audio, BSL and complete transcripts. Handsets are also available in the gallery, but we encourage you to bring your own device and headphones.

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Tranquillity exhibition

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We’ll be in Gallery 1. When you enter Wellcome Collection, it’s on the left on level 0.    

Gallery 1

Tranquillity

Explore the diversity of euphoric experiences and the effect of positive emotion on the body.

Joy is uplifting. It can be intense but brief, and leaves you wanting more. Some find joy while losing themselves on the dance floor, others while catching up with friends over a meal. This exhibition shares with you a diversity of euphoric experiences and the effect of positive emotion on the body. Joy can bring catharsis, build resilience and bring people together. New commissions by Harold Offeh, Amalia Pica and David Shrigley, plus artworks and historical objects dating back to the 15th century, guide you along some of the many paths to joy that different communities have sought, even in difficult times.

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Joy exhibition

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We’ll be in Gallery 2. To get there, go up the stairs or take the lift to level 1.

Gallery 2

At every turn the visitor will find something to fascinate.

This permanent gallery explores trust, identity and health in a changing world.

Being Human explores what it means to be human in the 21st century. It reflects our hopes and fears about new forms of medical knowledge, and our changing relationships with ourselves, each other and the world.

Featuring 50 artworks and objects, the gallery is divided into four sections: Genetics, Minds & Bodies, Infection, and Environmental Breakdown. Discover a refugee astronaut carrying their belongings to an unknown destination, sniff a perfumed bronze sculpture that smells of breast milk, listen to an epidemic jukebox, and watch a fast-food outlet slowly flood.

A complete set of gallery captions is available to read online.

Recorded audio descriptions of every exhibit and a highlights tour are available on the VocalEyes website. 

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Being Human gallery

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Permanent

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We’ll be in the ‘Being Human’ gallery, which you can find by taking the stairs or the lift to level 1.

Being Human

Our new permanent gallery explores trust, identity and health in a changing world.

Sir Henry Wellcome was a collector who, through his agents, amassed well over a million books, paintings and objects from around the world, aiming to tell a global story of health and medicine.  

This free permanent exhibition in central London reunites a cross-section of extraordinary objects about science, medicine, health and the body from Henry Wellcome's collection.

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