About the Exhibition
The instrument collection in the Josephinum is one of the most important collections of medical instruments in the German-speaking countries and contains just under 2,500 objects. It contains instruments from all subdomains of medicine and documents the history of medicine since the late 18th century, particularly with regard to the exploration of the human body and the development of technical aids for diagnosis and treatment.
Many of the instruments were developed by famous representatives of the medical faculty of Vienna in cooperation with leading instrument-makers of the time, or come from their own personal collections. Some were later mass-produced, while others were made to order for various institutes or professors and remained one-offs, making them unique treasures today. The emphases of the collection are, firstly, surgical tools, such as the Instrumentarium Chirurgicum Viennense, which was designed from the 1770s on by Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla, the first director of the Josephinum, and, secondly, instruments from the physiological institute that were made for in-house use, measuring various body parts and functions
As part of the exhibition “Ophthalmophantom and Bullet-Finder”, we present a new work by the Austrian artist Tillman Kaiser (b. 1972, Graz), which also relates to the Josephinum’s instrument collection and for which a series of photograms of objects from the collection were made. At the same time, this artistic intervention is the start of a planned series of cooperations with contemporary artists in the Josephinum under the title “Chiasmata”.
Curators: Simon Weber-Unger & Moritz Stipsicz
