Can International Museum Day help raise awareness?
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On the occasion of International Museum Day we visited one of the most traditional institutions on this planet, the Kunstkammer of Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg. The Kunstkammer or Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia and it was established by Peter the Great on the Neva Riverfront facing the Winter Palace. Peter’s museum was dedicated to preserving “natural and human curiosities and rarities”.
The image above shows one of the displays that is part of the First Natural Science Collections of the Kunstkamera, a permanent exhibition that aims to show the enormous diversity of the fauna of the world. Besides skeletal materials and plaster casts of fossils it features a large assortment of human and animal fetuses with anatomical deficiencies, which Peter bought from the Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch and pharmacologist Albertus Seba. Some of the most gruesome exhibits are the specimens of children’s limbs with lace covering the the part that used to be attached to the rest of the body.
This horror show makes you wonder if the celebration of International Museum Day could also help to raise the awareness among museums that by preserving such things as human remains they also bare the responsibilty for informing the audience about the origins of these objects (subjects?) and what they are trying to achieve by showing them. Although the Kunstkamera gives an elaborate explanation of the history and current status of the exhibition and collaborates with renowned institutions in other countries, thousands of museums throughout the world could still learn from the focus on good governance during International Museum Day.
Go to website Kunstkamera
Go to the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, 2006 to read more about museums and how they should deal with human remains.
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