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  • Skeletons

  • Until Sep 28 2008
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2BE
  • Rating:

  • By Peter Watts

    Posted: Mon Aug 4 2008

  • Easily overlooked in all the pomp and bluster surrounding ‘Hadrian’ at the British Museum, this extraordinary, powerfully personal and historically valuable show at the Wellcome Collection is by some distance the most interesting and best presented exhibition currently on in London.

    Twenty-six skeletons (borrowed from the Museum of London’s vast collection) have been laid out in what amounts to open coffins, illustrated by plaques explaining what the skeleton can tell you about the life of the deceased. It’s an excellent way of looking at the hardships ordinary Londoners have suffered over the years, with the bones given real pathos by sombre presentation and careful descriptions. Some of the younger skeletons especially are profoundly moving – a youthful skull scarred by syphilis and the shards of bone left by a 22-week foetus.
    Colour comes from large pictures of the contemporary locations of these lost burial grounds but this is a suitably minimalist treatment of a complex subject, and a lesson in how to get the most meaning out of limited but powerful artefacts.
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