Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor at The Old Operating Theatre, King's College, London
The Body is a Big Place will be presented twice as part of Science Gallery London’s season BLOOD: Life Uncut (27 July - 1 November 2017).
At The Old Operating Theatre, Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre dating 1822, the artists have reconceived the work as a form of relic - of the work itself and of a number of entangled histories of medicine and science. These include surgery and organ transplantation in particular, and the heart perfusion technique developed by German physiologist Oscar Langendorff in the 1890s that is now central to scientific cardiac research, and that forms the basis of previous live heart perfusion performances in The Body is a Big Place.
The second showing of the work will take place at Copeland Gallery in Peckham (Oct-Nov) as part of a larger exhibition of BLOOD: Life Uncut. Here the perfusion device will be animated with fresh pig’s blood that will flow continuously through the perfusion device over the 3-week exhibition. Alongside the perfusion device will be a 2-channel video project of the underwater swimming pool performance and a video of the live Science Gallery Dublin perfusion performance.
https://london.sciencegallery.com/blood/artworks/body-big-place/
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