Body Worlds’ cadavers on display bring anatomy to life

Fırat Kasapoğlu, the organizer who brought the collection to Turkey, led Sunday’s Zaman on a tour of the exhibit last Friday. Housed at Antrepo 3, an old customs warehouse in Tophane, the exhibition’s initial displays are affecting. Visitors first come face-to-face with the beginnings of human life in the form of a gradient set of perfectly preserved embryos, some no more than a few millimeters in height. It is then that an awareness of the authenticity of Body Worlds sinks in -- for every body, organ and tissue sample in the collection is real.

And the cadavers at Body Worlds don’t lie lifelessly upon tables -- they are dissected, cross-sectioned and often posed in “action,” such as the display of a man riding upon a rearing horse and typical scenes from daily life. The exhibition is not bloody or gory; the corpses, filled with reactive resins and elastomers, do not reek of formaldehyde or anything else. Dr. von Hagens’ works of plastination have created controversy in some nations, with pundits fretting over the ethicality of putting human remains on display in such a riveting manner. But major controversy has yet to emerge over the exhibit in Turkey -- the first Muslim country where a plastination collection has traveled and where some were concerned the reaction to Body Worlds might pose a problem. The reason for this may lie in the fact that soon after beginning to tour the displays, it becomes clear that Body Worlds is an exhibition whose overriding characteristic is educational utility, not entertainment value. As Kasapoğlu aptly noted, when at the Body Worlds exhibit, “What you see is what you are.”

Indeed, outside of the issue of displaying cadavers themselves, there is little at the exhibit that most would find offensive or unethical in itself. From 1977, when Dr. von Hagens began his work with plastination, until 1994, when his first public exhibition went on display, cadavers that had completed the plastination process were used solely for teaching and training medical professionals, Kasapoğlu said. Soon after entering the venue, visitors walk through a hall with simple photographs on the walls of centenarians providing advice on living a long healthy life, such as living purposefully and meaning something to someone. The stunning cadaver displays depict bodies in action, with some performing tasks like writing at a desk or playing a sport, but to instructive effect, explaining how muscle groups in the human body work together.

“The exhibition includes cadavers that individuals, while alive, donated to be used to scientific and educational ends as part of such exhibitions,” Kasapoğlu said, noting that no identifying information on the cadavers or their cause of death is identified in the displays. “The focus is on the body, not the soul,” he added, explaining that the exhibition’s emphasis on public health awareness was the focus of the entire project. “The exhibition focuses on preventative medicine and works to raise an awareness of what we as human beings do to our health,” he said. “The advice here is that what you see is what you are; you are what you eat, for example, and if you fail to exercise or you smoke, there are consequences.”

The educational value of the exhibition is further evinced by children touring the site, chattering excitedly to parents and teachers as they ask questions and get answers about different parts of the human body. One display features sets of carefully preserved lungs, presenting an in-your-face lesson about the damage that smoking can cause the human body. Others demonstrate different health problems for visitors, such as the striking difference in size between an enlarged heart and a normal one; the dangers of decreased activity following retirement are depicted memorably by the cadaver of an old man with a hunchback.

The Body Works exhibition, part of the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture program, offers an unforgettable and captivating look at the human body from many perspectives through the medium of the flexible plastination technique. One display has two figures on it -- one is a man’s skeleton and the other is the muscular system of the same person, both standing erect on the same platform. A set of displays includes only blood vessels pumped with red polymers -- a human face, for example, is distinguishable despite the lack of bones, muscles or flesh.