How ‘Body Worlds’ got under my skin

It is true to say about every exhibition, that behind each piece of it there is a human, whether it is an artist or a scientist. At Body Worlds, however, people are the exhibits. Walking through the darkness from one cabinet to another, it is easy to forget that what we are looking at are real human bodies or their parts. They all underwent the process of plastination, pioneered by doctor Gunther von Hagens, based on replacing the fat and water in tissues with plastic. If you take a closer look, however, you might be able to notice an unexpected crooked tooth, freckles or exceptionally blue eyes. These little details are a reminder that those bodies used to have a personality. They are way too natural an effortless to be fabricated.

The dissected bodies are referred to as plastinates,which, in all fairness, is far more graceful than cadavers or corpses.The exhibition does not provide its visitors with any information about the bodies’ owners. We never find out who they were, what they did and how they died. All the bodies obtained by von Hagens and his team are through a one of a kind donation program, which he established especially for the purposes of his project.

Encouraged by the enormous success of the original Body Worlds, many others noticed that dissecting and displaying corpses could be a great business. In the UK people could go and see Bodies Revealed and in the US:Bodies… The Exhibition as well as Our Body: The Universe Within, not to mention the ones in Australia, Asia and Europe. Apart from the legal battles von Hagens has started with his competitors, the source of most of the controversies were the origins of the bodies. Many countries struggled to approve the rather bizarre exhibition being shown within their borders, debating over its many aspects. Accusations that the bodies were allegedly of executed Chinese prisoners or homeless people from Russia were strongly denied by von Hagens, who claims that his program is fully ethical and those, whose bodies are made into plastinates, have given their full consent beforehand.

Currently there are nearly 1,800 donors enrolled in the program, willing to give up a peaceful afterlife for contribution to science. While maintaining that its main purpose is to educate those, who might not have paid full attention during biology classes in their youth, some called the exhibition pornography of death, saying that the dead belong in the ground.

Putting aside the ethical and religious concerns, Body Worlds definitely gets under one’s skin, literally and metaphorically speaking. Leaning forward to take a closer look at the vertebrae samples displayed in a glass cabinet, I have never been more aware of the shiver going down my spine. Each exhibit is equipped with a plaque describing the specimen in a way that to many might sound like medical babble, but probably is the easiest way of explaining the complex processes that take place in our bodies each second. Still, at some point it does get slightly overwhelming. Visitors are offered audio guides, which provide even more insight into the human nature. At the beginning, I dutifully read every plaque and listened to the audio guide, trying to learn as much as I could from the enormous exhibition spread across three floors of the London Pavilion, but I eventually started feeling as if I was studying for a biology test I really did not want to take. There was also a possibility that I might not be done before they start closing up. I gave up halfway through and decided to focus on the aspects that I found most interesting, glancing over the bit about pancreas and giving my full attention to the part about harmful effects of smoking.

Humanity has always been fascinated with the mysteries of the human bodies and death. Is it that surprising then that Body Worlds is visited by thousands of people wherever it goes and has been since the mid 90s? Probably not, and there is nothing that disturbing about people wanting to know how they look inside out. Body Worlds provides a safe and non-invasive way to do something that was previously reserved only for physicians.

It is somehow poetic that in the heart of London’s busy Piccadilly Circus, where people rush to their various appointments, surrounded by technology, food of questionable quality and polluted air, we can stop for a second and consider our own body. As unsettling as it can be, when you approach a motionless plastinate that has been stripped of its skin, smell and personality, there is a subtle artistic factor to the primarily educational exhibition. The plastinates, arranged into various positions, look as if they were frozen in time, during some bizarre danse macabre.

There is an undeniable beauty and magic in human bodies, that manifest in every breath and every heartbeat, and Body Worlds reminds us of that. It might be for the better that we do not know anything about the people whose bodies we study so closely. It prevents us from judging and leaves us free to be fascinated. Shows, that underneath the skin we are all the same.