Identity at the Wellcome Collection

I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Collection with some of our Psychology students on Thursday. Called Identity: 8 Rooms, 9 Lives, it deals with concepts of the self and how we as people construct our identities. It contains a succession of rooms, each dealing with the issues arising from the chosen subjects struggle with the many different strands identity that make up the self. Some of the chosen case studies were truly fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by the room about Claude Cahun. A woman before her time, her primitive and stark photography is strangely enthralling, dealing with notions of sexuality, gender, beauty, and logic. She looks at what constitutes a woman. This particular display I found so interesting because lately I have been reading a book about women (a somewhat feminist rant, I admit) and how sexualised they have become in our society. The books central premise looks at how our society has come to think that this is actually evidence of our equality in society, when in fact it is pretty much nothing more than the narrowing of people's ideas of sexuality and womanlyness, and the 'plasticising' of women. The prevalence of soft pornography in every aspect of our media means that sexiness now seems to be the sole jurisdiction of the porn star. I have to be honest, having seen Cahun's photography, as androgynous and bald as it appears, I still find it a more pleasing reflection of femininity than the Jordan wannabes that populate our local newstands, fetished, bronzed and remodeled to the hilt.

The Wellcome Collection also has a collection of modern art. Modern art is a strange one, always thought provoking yet often not visually pleasing. The large jelly baby featured, Jelly Baby 3, above was very appealing but not terribly thought provoking, while the I can't help the way I feel is incredibly unpleasing and disconcerting by immensely thought provoking. The accompanying text explained that the possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becomes manifest in its surface. The way in which the flesh grows can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapicitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. Intense...