Wellcome Collection to present an exhibition on the notions of beauty

The Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library in London exploring health and human experience, is to explore notions of beauty across time and culture.

'The Cult of Beauty' exhibition will run from October 26 to April 28, 2024, and will examine the profound influence of morality, status and health, age, race, and gender on the evolution of ideas about beauty through history.

The exhibition will explore three overarching themes: The Ideals of Beauty, The Industry of Beauty, and Subverting Beauty while inviting visitors to question established norms, challenge preconceived notions of beauty and will encourage dialogue, reflection, and more inclusive definitions of beauty.

The display will feature more than 200 objects and artworks, including artists Juno Calypso, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, and Angélica Dass, alongside new commissions by Narcissister, Xcessive Aesthetics, Renaissance Goo & Baum and Leahy, Makeupbrutalism (Eszter Magyar), and The Unseen. In addition, a new film, Permissible Beauty, developed by singer-songwriter and art historian David McAlmont, photographer, Robert Taylor and filmmaker Mark Thomas, amongst other Black artists and creatives will be shown in a museum exhibition for the first time.

The Cult of Beauty to challenge the ideals of beauty in culture in a new exhibition

Subverting Beauty will question what beauty means in society today and how it can be used as a tool to subvert social constructs and will include an experiential installation of digital content from the global south by Xcessive Aesthetics, exploring the opportunities nightclub bathrooms can offer as platforms for experimentation and community-building. While a film and new sculptural work by Narcissister will consider the crushing weight of beauty ideals within mixed-race mother-daughter relationships.

While the Ideals of Beauty will consider the beliefs that have shaped the pursuit of unattainable beauty in society across time and cultures by presenting historical objects such as corsets, mirrors and powder boxes from the 18th century up to today. This section will also feature a collaboration with author, academic and broadcaster Emma Dabiri, highlighting historical artefacts such as the 17th-century French Game of Goose and German photographer E. O. Hoppe’s The Book of Fair Women (1910-21) to address racist and exoticising pasts, alongside pop culture examples such as Josephine Baker and Rihanna’s beauty brand, Fenty to illustrate successful stories of disruption.

The exhibition will also approach The Industry of Beauty as a key theme to investigate the relationship between medicine and cosmetics, while tracing a history of product innovation, revealing how the industry has influenced our relationship with our bodies and self-image. British photographer Juno Calypso will present works featuring pastel pink and blue interiors, chintzy curtains and 1970s finger food, whilst her alter ego, Joyce, inflicts rigorous (and lonely) beauty regimes on herself.

There will also be a new multisensory commission Beauty Sensorium that will invite visitors to engage with the development of beauty’s rich connection to memory in a tactile way. Developed by Professor Jill Burke, a historian of the body, along with soft-matter scientist Professor Wilson Poon, and designers Baum & Leahy, the immersive installation room reinvents Renaissance iconography and materiality in playful, biophilic organic forms constructed by glass and ceramics.