Not Shock, Just Awe

I found myself at the O2 with a couple of hours to kill, and on impulse I decided to be brave and head for the Body World Mirrors of Time exhibition. I have only seen occasional glimpses of Dr Gunther von Hagens’ work on tv and in the press, so although I knew roughly what I was going to see, it was with a fair bit of caution that I walked into the first gallery.

The first sight of the ‘exhibits’ certainly freaked me a little bit. I was interested, but couldn’t bring myself to get too close, so I sort of circled round it for a while in silence (I didn’t bother with the ubiquitous commentary headphones), then decided to move on. The exhibition is designed to take you through every stage of life from conception to decrepitude and death, so the very next room had foetuses of various stages of development. Alongside the flayed and preserved exhibits that provide the instantly recognisable imagery of the exhibition were display cabinets containing various dissected bits and pieces of the human body with explanations about development, growth, health and disease.

I was acclimatised by now, so was able to look much more closely at the main exhibits as I walked around the silent, almost deserted galleries. The corpses are so brightly coloured they could almost be plastic models, apart from the roughness of texture that can be seen on tendons or the ragged edge of a finger or toenail as a reminder that these are real people. The shapes of ears were particularly individual and striking. There was also humour, which rather than feeling grotesque somehow added humanity and warmth, so that far from being a freak show, it became a celebration of the wonders of the body and of being human.

I came out from the exhibition moved and exhilarated, and I am sure that if you are a believer in intelligent design it would have confirmed your views. For me, the experience meant ninety minutes of meditation on the amazing complexities that keep us alive and functioning, and left me with a sense of awe that still hasn’t quite faded.