Dirt at the Wellcome Collection

Entry: Free

The Wellcome Collection's current big exhibition is Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, which runs until 31st August. It's the most information-heavy exhibition I've seen at the Wellcome Collection and it makes very good use of the available space. I'm actually surprised by how much content the curators have managed to pack into the room.

Obviously, the term “dirt” is pretty broad and the curators are careful to define exactly what they mean by it, though their definition doesn't narrow it down that much: “In this exhibition, 'dirt' is a term used to encompass dust, excrement, rubbish, bacteria and soil. It is also used as a metaphor to denote social, cultural or ethnic 'outsiders'.”

With this in mind I was expecting the exhibition to be divided up into sections based on each part of the definition. Instead, the curators made the decision to split it into six sections that each focus on different locations. The locations are: The home, Delft, 1683; the street, London, 1854; the hospital, Glasgow, 1867; the museum, Dresden, 1930; the community, New Delhi and Kolkata, 2011; and the land, Staten Island, 2030.*

This sounds utterly arbitrary, but each location was or is the site of some significant development in our relationship with dirt. For example, the Delft section looks at Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who, in 1683, wrote to the Royal Society in London and became the first the person to record seeing bacteria under a lens, while the final section focuses on Fresh Kills, the world's largest municipal landfill, which is currently being transformed into a public park, scheduled to open in 2030. Scattered throughout the historical and scientific information and artefacts are contemporary artworks that reflect or feature dirt in some way.

It should be clear from this description that it's a diverse exhibition. Having been hard on Alice Channer's Body Conscious show for a lack of cohesiveness, I feel I ought to have the same complaint about Dirt. It does feel like six small exhibitions, with only a loose connection between them, but each individual section is strong enough to forgive the rather weak thread linking them. The final sections, which deal with contemporary issues, are the most powerful and have more of an edge to them than the earlier parts. Altogether, it's definitely a powerful exhibition, and an overwhelmingly informative one, though sadly, the subject matter prevents it from ever being a beautiful one.

And while you're there you will be hyper aware every time somebody coughs.

*I feel like I'm writing a Fiasco playset as I type these out.