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 toMedical Museion to emphasize the close connection betweenmuseological 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.