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‘Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination’ is the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s most ambitious show in its 125 years. It explores the ways people have viewed the human body throughout history - and around the world - in fascinating detail.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, which will run until November 2010, also features a series of interactive activities, including the chance for visitors to listen to the sound of a diseased lung and see how the brain reacts to pain and disgust.

Contemporary artworks – as well as ancient artefacts - are dotted throughout the gallery, including a 5.5m mobile man, a cyborg and Marc Quinn’s Genomic Portrait of Professor Sir John Sulston.

Curator Anita Herle said: “This exhibition encourages visitors to think about what the human body is. Does everyone define the body in the same way? Does a doctor think about the body in the same way as an archaeologist? Does a contemporary artist see the body in the same way as an ancient artist?”

“We explore these questions using a wide-range of objects, including some of Cambridge’s extraordinarily rich and diverse collections, from medieval manuscripts to a phrenology head to a Maori child’s cloak.”

Juxtaposing the ancient and the modern, the beautiful and the scientific, a cast of Aphrodite stands close to a replica of Crick and Watson’s model of the double helix. Meanwhile, the first volume of the Human Genome Project sits across the gallery from a video monitor displaying images from the extraordinary Visible Human Project.

̽��ֱ��Visible Human Project saw the body of an executed convict, Joseph Paul Jernigan, photographed and subsequently digitised into thousands of separate images to produce a dataset of cross-sectional photos of the human body.

Elsewhere, one of the most moving elements of the exhibition are the body maps created by the Bambanani’s Women’s Group in South Africa.

̽��ֱ��life-size images articulate how each of the artists have been affected by HIV/AIDS. One of them, Bongiwe, said: “This small person inside my stomach is me. It is me when I started using ARVs (antiretroviral drugs). I was small and tiny. I was weighing 46kg. Then I started using ARVs and I gained a lot of weight. So this big body around the small body is me now.”

As well as displaying many of the objects within the Museum’s own collection, loans have also come from the Science Museum, National Portrait Gallery and from many of its sister museums at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, as well as its Colleges.
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