Joining Art and Science: The Special Exhibition Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen

How best to cover a large, complex, and sophisticated topic like biomedicine, or even the "age of biomedicine," in a small or medium-sized exhibition? The curators at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen have come up with a radical—and convincing—answer.

The Medical Museion is an institution with a long tradition, but over the past decade a substantial grant from a private research foundation has brought new energy to the museum and its collections. In 2001, the former Medical-Historical Museum at the University of Copenhagen changed its name to Medical Museion to emphasize the close connection between museological and historical research. Since 2004, its curators have focused on an exhibition project called "Biomedicine on Display," which explores aspects of the visual and material culture of contemporary biomedicine in various special exhibitions. The research and exhibition team, led by Thomas Söderqvist, is seeking "a more conscious aesthetic approach" to make possible "a stronger emotional engagement with the world of science."¹

The special exhibition Split and Splice is part of this effort. Its goal is to "unwrap some of the practices and some of the tools used to collect, circulate, fragment, extend, mediate, suspend, digitise, heal, control, categorise, image, generate and engineer the 21st-century body—and along with it, some 21st-century identities too," as the visitor learns in the entrance. And this statement, in form and content, both describes the exhibition and forms part of it at the same time.

Fig. 1.

Heaps of hardware—computers, printers, screens, and the like—comprising part of the section titled "Avalanches of Data" in Split and Splice.

(Photo courtesy Rikke Albrechtsen/Medical Museion.)

Split and Splice is an art exhibition or, more precisely, a science-art exhibition—"sci-art," as the designers call it. More than a few fancy, inventive, and original installations, which consist of large numbers, and in some instances heaps (see fig. 1), of original scientific artifacts, are carefully designed and displayed within the 250 square meters (2,690 square feet) of exhibition space in the beautiful old rooms of the museum. The installations are similar in style to the introductory statement cited above, with its many verbs and commas, careful shaping, and broad message. All at the same time, the installations play with the rooms, with the topics they represent, with the scientific artifacts they display, and with the visitors they invite. What is it that the designers are trying to tell us? Is science such a playful thing?

Fragments are displayed and highlighted in eleven sections (mostly rooms, including the visitors' rest room, plus an additional floor, staircase, and the old auditorium). Every section is dedicated to a particular subject within the broader topic of the exhibition and is introduced by a catchy, if not immediately understandable, title, such as "Confluence," "Containing a Torrent," and "Avalanches of Data" (the titles for the first three rooms, respectively). These sections mostly consist of numerous objects, along with a few carefully chosen descriptions on wall plates with concise introductions to the sections' topics.

Fig. 2.

Black shelf displaying a variety of biomedical receptacles, such as flasks, jars, bags, bowls, pipettes, and others, part of the section titled "Containing a Torrent" in Split and Splice.

(Photo courtesy Rikke Albrechtsen/Medical Museion.)

The first room, "Confluence," deals with an example of biomedical practice: the analysis of human blood samples with specially prepared antibodies from rabbits in order to reveal human diseases. At the micro-scale level of biomedical agents, the extracts of different species flow together; species work and function similarly on the molecular level: "humans are animals too," as one of the introductory statements explains. The biomedical procedures represented here are not intended to be transparent in every detail; instead, only a selection of essential devices and tools, including a cage of lively rabbits, is displayed on a scaffold in the center of the room, with the aim of generating broader impressions. But is...