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GALLERY
This gallery presents selected photographs from the Living and Dying exhibition at the British Museum. The images highlight how the museum displays cultural objects, acknowledges colonial histories, and frames debates about heritage and ownership.
Understanding the Exhibition
Exploring how the Living and Dying gallery presents global cultures and narratives
The Living and Dying gallery explores how different cultures around the world understand life, death, and wellbeing. As the museum states, these are “challenges shared by all,” presented through a wide range of cultural practices.
At the same time, many of the objects displayed in this gallery entered the British Museum during the period of imperial expansion. While the museum attempts to contextualize these objects by explaining their meanings, it does not always fully address the colonial histories behind their collection.
This gallery allows us to explore how these stories are presented, and to question whether the exhibition offers a truly decolonized narrative, or if it continues to reproduce older colonial ways of understanding the world.
ENTRY TO EXHIBITION
01
The entrance to the Living and Dying exhibition already establishes a Eurocentric framework. Through both language and spatial design, Western medical knowledge—particularly in the central Pharmacopea installation—is positioned as the normative and authoritative standard.
02
Other healing practices are presented as “different,” reinforcing a hierarchy in which non-Western knowledge appears secondary or less legitimate. The use of universal language, such as shared experiences of life and death, further obscures the unequal conditions shaped by colonial histories.
As a result, the exhibition does not simply present global diversity, but organizes it in a way that reproduces colonial ways of knowing.
01
The entrance to the Living and Dying exhibition already establishes a Eurocentric framework. Through both language and spatial design, Western medical knowledge—particularly in the central Pharmacopea installation—is positioned as the normative and authoritative standard.
02
Other healing practices are presented as “different,” reinforcing a hierarchy in which non-Western knowledge appears secondary or less legitimate. The use of universal language, such as shared experiences of life and death, further obscures the unequal conditions shaped by colonial histories.
As a result, the exhibition does not simply present global diversity, but organizes it in a way that reproduces colonial ways of knowing.
PHARMACOPOEIA
01
“Pharmacopoeia is a medical-art collaboration between the artists Susie Freeman and David Critchley and the family doctor Liz Lee. Over the last ten years we have created a body of work that explores different aspects of health and ill health” (Pharmacopoeia, n.d., para. 2).
02
Dance celebration
This photograph illustrates how the British nation has been shaped by immigration, depicting a South Asian celebration organized by immigrants in Cambridge. Within the Pharmacopoeia collection, it stands out as the only image that explicitly engages with the theme of migration, directly addressing the cultural presence and contributions of immigrant communities.
01
“Pharmacopoeia is a medical-art collaboration between the artists Susie Freeman and David Critchley and the family doctor Liz Lee. Over the last ten years we have created a body of work that explores different aspects of health and ill health” (Pharmacopoeia, n.d., para. 2).
02
Dance celebration
This photograph illustrates how the British nation has been shaped by immigration, depicting a South Asian celebration organized by immigrants in Cambridge. Within the Pharmacopoeia collection, it stands out as the only image that explicitly engages with the theme of migration, directly addressing the cultural presence and contributions of immigrant communities.
PERÚ AND THE ANDEAN WORLD
01
PACCHA
An Inca paccha is a ceremonial water vessel used in agricultural rituals. It was used to pour liquids into the earth as part of fertility ceremonies, reflecting the deep relationship between Andean communities and the land. These objects show how the environment was understood as a living force essential for survival.
02
KERO CUP
The kero cup was used for drinking chicha, a traditional fermented maize beverage, during ceremonies and rituals. Some examples reflect colonial influence, showing how Indigenous practices adapted during the colonial period while maintaining cultural continuity.
03
CONOPA
A conopa is a small ritual object used in fertility ceremonies related to crops and livestock. Often shaped like animals such as llamas, these objects were believed to hold spiritual power and played an active role in maintaining balance between people, nature, and the spiritual world.
While these objects highlight cultural richness and continuity, their presentation tends to frame Andean societies as timeless and closely tied to nature, overlooking the historical and colonial contexts that have shaped them.
01
PACCHA
An Inca paccha is a ceremonial water vessel used in agricultural rituals. It was used to pour liquids into the earth as part of fertility ceremonies, reflecting the deep relationship between Andean communities and the land. These objects show how the environment was understood as a living force essential for survival.
02
KERO CUP
The kero cup was used for drinking chicha, a traditional fermented maize beverage, during ceremonies and rituals. Some examples reflect colonial influence, showing how Indigenous practices adapted during the colonial period while maintaining cultural continuity.
03
CONOPA
A conopa is a small ritual object used in fertility ceremonies related to crops and livestock. Often shaped like animals such as llamas, these objects were believed to hold spiritual power and played an active role in maintaining balance between people, nature, and the spiritual world.
While these objects highlight cultural richness and continuity, their presentation tends to frame Andean societies as timeless and closely tied to nature, overlooking the historical and colonial contexts that have shaped them.
AIDS
01
TIMELINE
Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework, this display can be read as constructing a binary between “Indigenous medicine” and “Western medicine,” rather than presenting medicine as a plural, culturally embedded practice.
The linguistic framing of the exhibit further reinforces this divide. The use of terms like “Indigenous,” alongside a timeline that groups Tanzanian, Indian, and Chinese medical traditions together, risks flattening distinct epistemologies into a single category defined in opposition to the West. This raises the question: isn’t medicine just medicine? The display suggests otherwise—it presents Western medicine as universal and scientific, while coding other practices as culturally specific, and therefore less transferable or “useful.” What becomes “loaded” here is not medicine itself, but the power structures that determine which forms of knowledge are legitimized.
02
FACING HIV
Through the lens of representation and othering, the Tanzanian subjects are constructed as objects of observation rather than agents of knowledge. The reference to “poorest countries” reinforces a developmental narrative in which non-Western societies are implicitly behind, and therefore in need of Western intervention. In contrast, the white European figure is individualized and professionalized, symbolizing expertise and control. This aligns with broader colonial discourses that equate whiteness with authority and non-Western identities with deficiency.
03
The juxtaposition of images is central to this meaning-making. The photograph of a Tanzanian man being treated by spiritual healers for AIDS, placed directly beneath an image of a white European man examining a medical cabinet, creates a visual binary. Through multimodality, as defined by Theo van Leeuwen, meaning is not produced through text alone but through the interaction of visual, spatial, and linguistic elements. Here, the European figure is associated with order, control, and scientific legitimacy—his posture, setting, and tools signify institutional medicine. In contrast, the Tanzanian scene is framed through informality and spirituality, which, within a Western epistemological framework, can be read as less “modern” or less credible.
01
TIMELINE
Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework, this display can be read as constructing a binary between “Indigenous medicine” and “Western medicine,” rather than presenting medicine as a plural, culturally embedded practice.
The linguistic framing of the exhibit further reinforces this divide. The use of terms like “Indigenous,” alongside a timeline that groups Tanzanian, Indian, and Chinese medical traditions together, risks flattening distinct epistemologies into a single category defined in opposition to the West. This raises the question: isn’t medicine just medicine? The display suggests otherwise—it presents Western medicine as universal and scientific, while coding other practices as culturally specific, and therefore less transferable or “useful.” What becomes “loaded” here is not medicine itself, but the power structures that determine which forms of knowledge are legitimized.
02
FACING HIV
Through the lens of representation and othering, the Tanzanian subjects are constructed as objects of observation rather than agents of knowledge. The reference to “poorest countries” reinforces a developmental narrative in which non-Western societies are implicitly behind, and therefore in need of Western intervention. In contrast, the white European figure is individualized and professionalized, symbolizing expertise and control. This aligns with broader colonial discourses that equate whiteness with authority and non-Western identities with deficiency.
03
The juxtaposition of images is central to this meaning-making. The photograph of a Tanzanian man being treated by spiritual healers for AIDS, placed directly beneath an image of a white European man examining a medical cabinet, creates a visual binary. Through multimodality, as defined by Theo van Leeuwen, meaning is not produced through text alone but through the interaction of visual, spatial, and linguistic elements. Here, the European figure is associated with order, control, and scientific legitimacy—his posture, setting, and tools signify institutional medicine. In contrast, the Tanzanian scene is framed through informality and spirituality, which, within a Western epistemological framework, can be read as less “modern” or less credible.
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