Contribute to our crowdfunding campaign

I have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £900 towards our exhibition in November. Which will be held in the Peltz gallery and be free to all.

UPDATE: Our campaign has made the kickstarter editors’ pick; they’ve badged it as a ‘project they love’.

UPDATE 2: Our campaign has met its target. But it’s not too late to contribute. All further proceeds go to keeping Anna in food as the project goes on, so that she can work on further examples.

£900 doesn’t sound like much but it will make a real difference to the quality of the work and the exhibition. Any contribution, even as small as £5 will help to make it closer to the goal. There are a number of rewards attributed with each pledge, including original signed A5 prints. Or, if you’re feeling really generous you could get your name included in the artwork for the exhibition.

If you aren’t feeling rich enough to contribute financially, perhaps you could help by tweeting about our campaign or by sharing this news on facebook.
With your help I can make this exhibition look its best!
Follow this link to get more information and to help out.
Thank you in advance for your valuable support!
Anna.

Conceiving Histories at Birkbeck Arts Week

Come and see our work in progress on the Conceiving Histories project, which looks at the history of un-pregnancy (trying to conceive, the difficulty of diagnosing early pregnancy and reproductive disappointment).

WEDNESDAY 17th MAY 2017, 6-7.30pm. Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square. FREE. ALL WELCOME. Book a place here.

We will be talking about pregnancy diagnosis today and in the past. How did people in the past imagine and anticipate the future of pregnancy diagnosis? For all our technological advancement, in what ways does our experience of trying to diagnose early pregnancy resemble that of people in the past?

Here is one assessment from Giralamo Mercurio in the fifteenth century, which didn’t quite predict the future:

As to the signs that some people think they see in the urine, this is such a false lie that it belongs more to charlatans than to physicians because the moon has more to do with shrimp than with urine in showing whether or not a woman is pregnant.[1]

How reasonable he sounds but, it turns out, how wrong. Of course Mercurio was arguing against those who thought that urine was key to pregnancy diagnosis, who imagined the future that we now inhabit. Come and hear more about a curious history which is strangely more connected with our world today than is always thought.

We’ll be looking at some new art work from Anna Burel which focuses on the bizarre Xenopus frog pregnancy test, used in the twentieth century. Here is an example:

Frog Work, © 2017
Frog Work, © Anna Burel 2017

There are also lots of other interesting events at Birkbeck Arts Week. They are all free and everyone is welcome. Find out more and book your place here.


Featured image at the top of this page: monkey doctor and a stork, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 298, folio 81r

[1] Girolamo Mercurio, cited in Rudolf Bell, How to do it: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (pp. 71-72).