A two-headed lamb and ancient dildos: the UK's strangest new museum
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Version 0 of 1. A pile of sperm whale’s teeth sits next to an egg of the extinct elephant bird in a basement in Hackney, while a cluster of ancient Chinese dildos compete for space with assorted body parts in jars. The four eyes of a double-headed lamb peer out from inside a glass case, surveying the majestic clutter. The scene is piled high with bones, seed pods, medical instruments and Happy Meal toys. “I’m trying to get the whole world in here,” says Viktor Wynd, reclining on a velvet banquette in his new Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History, a jam-packed lair of eccentricity in a former call centre on Mare Street that he has transformed into a weird and wonderful nest. “I’m so bored of contemporary museums and their desperate attempt to classify and make sense of everything,” he says. “The world is one big, glorious mess and we should celebrate that.” Over the last decade, this self-proclaimed dandy and dilettante has built up a collection of the arcane and the antique, spanning everything from a gigantic hairball extracted from a cow’s stomach to a range of odd, fleshy lumps suspended in jars – one of his favourites, it turns out, is “the front bottom of an 18th-century prostitute.” His collection began with three dead babies in bottles, and they’re clearly dear to his heart: “You wouldn’t think it, but they’re beautiful things, peacefully sleeping, all curled up.” A new book, Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders, charts the depths of his oddball accumulation and tours the homes of other eccentrics, providing advice on how to start your own collection of freakish finds. As a kind of installation artist who seems to be living one extended performance, Wynd has gathered a cultish following by organising a series of lavish masked balls and soirees under the auspices of The Last Tuesday Society, which he describes as a “social organism”; it currently has 18,000 members. He plans to host a regular literary salon in the society’s new home. For an admission charge of £3, which includes a cup of tea, the public will be treated to this wunderkammer of the miscellaneous and macabre, as well as galleries upstairs that will host changing exhibitions, beginning with a show of English surrealists. There is also a rentable room for private dining – where, naturally, guests will eat off a sarcophagus containing a 19th-century human skeleton, surrounded by outsider erotica and overlooked by a caged lion skeleton. Wynd has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help finish off the project – which is set to open in November – and meet public accessibility standards. “We need to put in a disabled loo,” he says, “but I stupidly spent my last money on the skull of an executed felon.” |