Focusing on the face and the post-mortem body in medical and forensic contexts, Dr. Gemma Angel and Kathryn Smith will explore questions of likeness, ethics, artistic practice and aesthetics in relation to representations of the post-mortem face in forensic and contemporary art contexts. Chaired by UCL Pathology Museum Curator Subhadra Das.

Guests will also have the opportunity to view a small exhibition of specimens from UCL Pathology Collections, which will be on display as part of Dr. Angel's ongoing research project Looking, Feeling, Knowing: The politics of seeing in medical collections of human remains after the Human Tissue Act.

Kathryn Smith, Liverpool John Moores University FACE Lab - Technologies of the Post-mortem Face

This presentation will introduce the basic principles of craniofacial identification and depiction - otherwise known as forensic art - focusing on predictions of living appearance of individuals generated from post-mortem remains in both forensic and historical cases. The notion of ‘technology’ is considered in its literal sense with reference to the tools used in facial depiction (including both manual and computer-assisted methods), as well as its connotation within cultural anthropology, as the sum of a group’s practical knowledge expressed through material culture. I will consider the research that supports the practical application of scientific standards in facial prediction/depiction, including current research in facial recognition, in relation to some ideas and expectations we have about portraiture, in the context of a conspicuous lack of theoretical consideration of the visual cultures of forensic work, and how aesthetic choices made by forensic artists may impact on the success or efficacy of facial depictions and vice versa.

Gemma Angel, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies - Facing Death. Contemporary Art and the Medical Museum

In 1981, a sixteen-year-old Damien Hirst posed for a photograph next to the disembodied head of an unidentified (but identifiable) cadaver at Leeds Anatomy School, during an art school visit to the dissection laboratories. A decade later, the image was exhibited publicly for the first time at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris; Hirst credits this photograph with the beginning of his art career.

More recent exhibitions of the photograph in London have been met with public and professional outrage amongst museum curators and scholars who work with human remains, reflecting a shift in the perception of human remains held within institutional contexts. Whilst anatomical dissection and artistic practice have gone hand-in-hand for centuries, contemporary relationships between medical institutions and artists such as Hirst who seek to access their collections, have been marked by conflict, controversy and a disjuncture between professional medical codes of ethics, and artistic intentions.

This paper will examine Hirst's controversial image With Dead Head (1991), in light of ethical questions about access, ownership, treatment, display and visibility of human body parts in both the medical museum, and in contemporary art practice.