Bodies Past and Present

Bodies Past and Present. An exhibition of student art. 10 Oct 2023- 12 Jan 2024.

Bodies Past and Present

An exhibition of student art

10 October 2023 - 12 January 2024

The Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) is proud to host the exhibition Bodies Past and Present, featuring the work of eleven Cambridge University students from the Department of Architecture and the Faculties of Classics and English. Their site-specific works respond to the sculpture in our Gallery in media ranging from oils to plaster casts.

a student paints a canvas, working from a photograph of entwined bodies on her laptop screen

Student artist Isabel Painter works on her contribution

These responses make us see the Museum’s Greco-Roman bodies differently. They make these bodies more alien and more relevant. What does it mean to look at ancient representations of the body from the vantage point of the present? Why represent the human body at all? And why that vision of the human body? How human(e) is it?

Our talented artists come at these questions visually and self-consciously, privileging the personal, the political, the visceral and contemporary. In a world of gender wars, #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, social media, robots and AI, these questions are as urgent as ever. And they are urgent for the Museum of Classical Archaeology: Classics is a subject that hasn’t always felt accessible to everyone. What if our students’ art can effect change? Certainly, its perspective on the body connects the past with the present, the individual with community, and Cambridge with the world at large.

Student Curators

Co-Curators Miriam Mitchell (3rd year Classicist) and Connor Phillips (3rd year Architect) join forces to highlight the creativity that often lies hidden within the University’s student body. Miriam is the founder of the MOCA society, designed to increase accessibility to, and involvement of the student body within, the Gallery. Connor has also founded an art collective and worked with the Cambridge Union to increase opportunities for artists.

Student Artists

Alice Basu

Ata Gonul

Shawn Mwenje

Isabel Painter

Bertie Politi

Samia Rashid

Ruby Schofield

Hanna Turi, in her third year of a four-year Classics course

Edward Xu