Do you smoke?
Have you been to New York?
Do you feel like getting freaked the fuck out?
Then make your way to the Wellcome Collection. As part of their new permanent gallery called Being Human, there’s a special display by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. She took cigarettes butts off the streets of Manhattan, harvested & sequenced the DNA, 3D-printed the faces of the people that it belonged to, then hung them up in the gallery.
And that’s just one of 50 different artworks & installations there are to explore. The rest of the exhibition is all split up into four distinct sections, each dealing with a different fundamental aspect of humanity: Genetics, Minds & Bodies, Infection, and Environmental Breakdown.
There’s not just artworks either, with lab equipment like hand-held gene sequencer, and a mail-order genetic editing kit on display too. Seeing as it’s planned to be permanent though, emphasis is being placed on less on the cutting edge of scientific discoveries, and more on the larger ones that have shaped our present world.
And as usual, it’s all completely free.
Which is Wellcoming.
NOTE: Being Human is on permanent display at the Wellcome Collection. It’s free entry, and you can find out more at their website right HERE.
Wellcome Collection | 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE
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