New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Body art and science
Exhibit uses real specimens to highlight the human anatomy
The understandable part of “Real Bodies: The Exhibition” is its teaching role as an eyepopping display of human anatomy.
The new Connecticut Science Center exhibition presents a display of 16 real, perfectly preserved, whole-body specimens and 129 individual organ specimens. The Hartford venue is the first stop for the traveling exhibition, based on the permanent exhibition in Las Vegas.
But organizers say it’s also founded on cultural and emotional narratives and it explores the “emotional expression embedded in physiological functions.”
Say what? We ran up to the science center for a preview to check out those claims, and we later called Las Vegas to chat with the founder of the company that produced the exhibition.
“Real Bodies: The Exhibition,” on display through June 30 on the fourth floor of the science center in downtown Hartford, purports to “dig deeper into the beauty of the body, mind and soul than any other exhibition of its kind, and invites you to explore the entire human experience from the first breath to the last.”
The exhibition was created by 10-year-old Imagine Exhibitions, which produces almost three dozen unique
exhibitions in museums, science centers, zoos, integrated resorts and other venues worldwide.
Like the Yale Center for British Art exhibit on William Hunter that we previewed recently, this one raises questions of who these deceased people were and how their bodies (or drawings and casts of same in the case of the Yale exhibit) ended up in a traveling exhibition. One aims a basketball, another a dart, a third strikes tennis-serve pose.
Imagine Exhibitions President and CEO Tom Zaller said the preserved bodies (all from the past two decades) come from a partnership with anatomist Hong-Jin Sui of Dalian Medical University in China.
“All of the bodies are what are called ‘unclaimed,’ so they’re all donated through a medical university program,” Zaller said. “But the individual themselves didn’t necessarily donate their body.”
It’s a common practice in medical teaching in this country, actually, and there’s even a book Zaller referenced called “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.”
“The important thing to remember is that everything is done with a scientific method behind it,” said Zaller. “Everything is based on education and everything is done with dignity and respect. And so, even though these are human remains, and that is a very real thing, right, we are teaching kids and adults anatomy and utilizing real human specimens ... it’s there for the purpose of education.”
As for the cultural and emotional descriptions about the exhibition, Zaller said it’s not about some of the bodies being posed in sports positions. You also need to spend time with the signs accompanying them.
“I’ve been doing these exhibitions since 2004, all over the world... The actual specimens and their dissection, they are specifically put into each room to illustrate a function of that anatomical position. So in the Breathe gallery, where we talk about the respiratory system, we show detailed dissections of the bronchial tree and the lungs.”
But Zaller and Co. wanted to do a little something different with this show.
“We also wanted to talk a little bit about humanity and culture and emotional connections to the body, both physically and spiritually,” he said. The heart is a magnificent organ, for example, but in most cultures it’s (also) associated with love or soul, Zaller said.
“Look, we all walk around every day with (these) amazing, functioning systems that all work together that we still don’t fully understand. But there’s also some other narratives I think that we want to use this time to describe it — from the beginning of anatomists’ study to the current work and the Repair gallery (new heart valves, joints) at the end.”
The Hunger gallery looks at eating from tongue tip to tail and how food has changed, but also the importance of the family meal to humans, Zaller said.
“So that was our approach in creating the exhibition: Yes, there’s an amazing anatomical exhibition, they’re real human bodies that are being used to show you this in the most real way possible, and there’s these other connections you can make to create a better overall educational experience.”
The traveling exhibitions stem from a popular permanent exhibition at Bally’s in Las Vegas, and while parts of this one have been seen in Sin City, the Hartford gig is the first time “Real Bodies” is being shown on the East Coast (although other anatomy exhibitions have toured regionally and around the world in recent years).