LONDON.- A museum of rare and priceless marvels of the natural and scientific worlds, from Dodo Bones to specula, to the intriguing beauty of McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys; from old master etchings to mad women’s doodles; from two-headed kittens to living coral …
Viktor Wyndlaunched his Little Shop of Horrors onto an at once expectant and grateful publicin 2009.Hovering halfway betweentheatre and sculpture, shop and museum, academic institution and art gallery,it is,like its founder, both an installation and a performance.
The Shop was justone of many elements of Wynd’s remarkable social sculpture, The Last TuesdaySociety, anorganisation that currently boasts some 18,000 members, sells over13,000 tickets a year to ‘a veritable feast ofexperiences and productions’ - eventsthat range from ‘evenings of loss’ to literary salons and masked balls - andhasover 3,000 daily visitors to its website.
Now the Shop is being converted into
The Viktor WyndMuseum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History, aunique Wunderkabinettthat, as Wynd himself remarks, will offer ‘a mirror to a world so suffused withmiraclesand beauty that any attempt at categorization is bound to fail.’
The Museum will be divided intotwo parts: the Upper Galleries, with up to two art exhibitions a year, and thedouble-vaultedbasement Wunderkabinett, displaying the permanent collection in custom-builtand salvagedmuseum and jewellery cases.For the opening, Wynd is inviting a number of high profile and completely unknown contemporaryartiststo subvert the permanent collection, responding to the notion of The InfectedMuseum, while upstairsa selection of workfrom thepermanent collection, together with loans from private collections, willhighlight the English Surrealists andCrypto-Surrealists, from Leonora Carrington to AustinOsmanSpare.
A packed schedule of talks and demonstrations, ranging from aquarium husbandry to taxidermy, will allow visitors to plunge deeper into the world of curiosity, whilst sipping cocktails and nibbling snacks prepared by the museum caf and bar. The events programme will be co-curated by Viktor Wynd, Mark Pilkington and Amber Butchart. For the more adventurous,The Lion Room - tucked deep in the bowels of the lower galleries - isavailable for privatehire for dinners and intimate encounters for up to tenpeople. Seated ondeep velvet banquettes, guests will dine offa sarcophagus holding a 19thcentury human skeleton, surrounded byerotica and overlooked by acaged lion skeleton and a disturbingly powerfulMervyn Peake painting.
