CUT! | Old Operating Theatre, 9a St Thomas’ Street, SE1 9RY

Exhibition 3^rd – 23^rd November 2014

Private View 4^th November 17:30 – 21:00

 

CUT! is an exhibition curated by students from the MA Culture, Criticism & Curation course at Central Saint Martins that brings together new animations made by students from the college’s MA Character Animation course and new composers from the Drama Composition Pathway at The Guildhall School of Music & Drama. This unique collaboration takes place at The Old Operating Theatre, famous for its fascinating collection about historic surgery and original anatomical theatre.

 

The exhibition showcases 40 animations integrated within this quirky historic venue and offers contemporary interpretations on the 19^th century surgical operations that took place there and the objects associated with them. The juxtaposition of antique objects and settings with digital animations provokes questions about scientific certainty and the effect of human imagination on it.

 

The Old Operating Theatre itself is also examined as space that exhibits ‘weird’ science – a place of now-redundant but no less gripping surgical practice, where fear and fearlessness are fellow accomplices. With increased access to previously out-of-reach medical information, the patient’s view is now as important as the doctor’s, infecting science with a new subjectivity and emotionality, but also offering a wider view of human experience. This is reflected in the 40 animations in this exhibition, which act as mediators between the objects and the effect they have had on people’s lives.

In this way, this exhibition provides a provocative creative interpretation of the compelling relationship between doctors and patients, science and the imagination.