'Strange Foreign Bodies' responds to Hunter's legacy

Strange Foreign Bodies
Extended to 10 February 2019
Hunterian Art Gallery
Admission free

Image copyright Ruth ClarkThis year The Hunterian has marked the 300th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Dr William Hunter (1718–1783), with a major exhibition that reunites his remarkable collections of artworks, anatomical specimens, books, coins and more.

To accompany William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum, The Hunterian also presents two concurrent exhibitions of contemporary art: Rosengarten, which revisits a 2004 installation made by author Janice Galloway and sculptor Anne Bevan, and Strange Foreign Bodies, a new group exhibition featuring works by seven international artists, many of whom are exhibiting in Scotland for the first time. Both exhibitions question and challenge Hunter’s 18th-century worldview and offer other ways of seeing the human body in relation to art and science.

All three exhibitions are on show at the Hunterian Art Gallery and will be open over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

Among the works included in Strange Foreign Bodies are prints and sculptures by acclaimed Glasgow-based artist Claire Barclay. These works, which use material ranging from vellum to saddlery leather and machine-tooled brass, respond to Hunter’s casts and etchings of dissections of women who died in late pregnancy. Working with Glasgow Print Studio and with Glasgow precision engineering company Bar Knight, Barclay has produced works that offer abstract and intuitive ways of understanding Hunter’s troubling objects and images.

Two pieces by Christine Borland extend the exhibition’s exploration of the intersections between art and science. SimWoman (2010) is a short film that documents Borland’s alteration of an animatronic mannequin used to simulate symptoms in medical training: discovering that no female version of the mannequin was in production, Borland cast her own body in wax to produce what is both an uncanny self-portrait and a portrayal of contemporary medical technology.

Borland’s Family Conversation Piece (1998) also uses casting, in this case to remake synthetic skulls used in the teaching of anatomy as blue-and-white bone china objects. These skulls allude to the close links between 18th-century commercial trade, colonial appropriation of objects and imagery, and slavery.

Also addressing these issues is One World in Relation (2009) by Malian-born, New York-based filmmaker Manthia Diawara. In this work, Diawara accompanies renowned poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant as he travels from the UK to New York aboard the Queen Mary II – a journey that consciously echoes that of 18th-century slaves. As they travel, Glissant offers a compelling account of his ideas about the value of creole identities and his rethinking of the importance of the African diaspora.

Another perspective on the politics of identity is offered by Phillip Warnell’s 2009 film Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies. Here the artist collaborated with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Taking his own experience as the recipient of a heart transplant as a cue, Nancy has written some of the most moving and most unsettling accounts of human embodiment as a constant engagement with otherness: humans are the real ‘strange foreign bodies’ in Nancy’s account. Warnell’s film gives us a glimpse into Nancy’s thinking, through the philosopher’s presence in the film alongside shots of a heart being prepared for transplantation, and sequences showing an octopus in a vitrine aboard an unmanned boat.

An octopus is also a key protagonist in Sarah Browne’s Report to an Academy (2016). Here the Dublin-based artist gives a pointed critique of contemporary employment practices, via an adaptation of a short story by Kafka. In Browne’s retelling, we meet a woman who has metamorphosed into an octopus under the pressure of her working environment, and whose voice is provided by ‘Fiona’, a computerised voice produced by Apple.

Strange mixtures of human and animal bodies and of advanced technology inform the sculptural and video work of Alex Impey too: Strange Foreign Bodies includes two pieces by this innovative emerging artist, including a 2014 sculptural installation and a video work made especially for the exhibition.

Finally, prints by Berlin-based Swiss-Iranian Shahryar Nashat echo Hunter’s prolific collecting of art, presenting altered documentation of works in a German collection that, like The Hunterian was a pioneer in turning a private collection into a public one.

Through all these works, Strange Foreign Bodies responds to Hunter’s legacy (and that of 18th-century culture more widely), by identifying contemporary resonances of interests in art, in anatomy, in collecting, in other cultures, and in the founding of academies and museums.

Strange Foreign Bodies is at the Hunterian Art Gallery until 10 February 2018.

Hunterian Art Gallery
University of Glasgow
82 Hillhead Street
Glasgow G12 8QQ

Open Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm and Sunday 11.00am – 4.00pm

www.glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian

Image © Ruth Clark.

For further information contact:
Dr Dominic Paterson, Curator of Contemporary Art, The Hunterian

For images contact:
Harriet Gaston, Communications Manager, The Hunterian, or download a selection from our Press Image section.

Notes to Editors

Festive Opening Hours
The Hunterian Museum, Hunterian Art Gallery and Mackintosh House will be closed from 4.00pm on Sunday 23 December 2018. They will be open from 10.00am – 5.00pm on Thursday 27, Friday 28, and Saturday 29 December, and 11.00am – 4.00pm on Sunday 30 December 2018. All will then close from 31 December 2018, re-opening on 3 January 2019.

The Hunterian
The Hunterian is one of the world's leading University museums and one of Scotland’s greatest cultural assets. Built on Dr William Hunter’s founding bequest, The Hunterian collections include scientific instruments used by James Watt, Joseph Lister and Lord Kelvin; outstanding Roman artefacts from the Antonine Wall; major natural and life sciences holdings; Hunter’s own extensive anatomical teaching collection; one of the world’s greatest numismatic collections and impressive ethnographic objects from Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages.

The Hunterian is home to one of the most distinguished public art collections in Scotland and features the world’s largest permanent display of the work of James McNeill Whistler, the largest single holding of the work of Scottish artist, architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and The Mackintosh House, the reassembled interiors from his Glasgow home.

The Hunterian has also developed an important collection of works by leading contemporary artists including Lucy Skaer, Ilana Halperin, Mat Collishaw, Mark Dion and Christine Borland.

glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian

First published: 18 December 2018