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# The Body Worlds exhibition at VDNKh and the ethics of displaying human bodies in museums
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/na-vdnkh-vot-vot-dolzhna-otkrytsia-vystavka-chelovecheskikh-trupov/
- Published: 2021-03-02T08:56:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:00:50.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Moscow, Museums, Observations, Society

An exhibition of human corpses is about to open at VDNKh. In effect, the Body Worlds project is a travelling morgue which, under the name of Dr Hagens, wanders the globe displaying human bodies saturated, soon after death, with a special compound to prevent decay and lend the tissues elasticity. The attraction invites us to gaze upon flayed human flesh in poses characteristic of the living: in athletic postures, playing musical instruments, sitting at a chessboard. The skinned corpses are presented, as it were, as a teaching aid in the structure of the human body, while the dead, sliced in two, in four and into a hundred pieces, illustrate the arrangement of the internal organs. The question that arises is not so much one of museum ethics, since in essence this cabinet of curiosities differs from the museum collections we are used to only in the number of exhibits made from real human bodies; the more acute problem is the balance between the primitive human craving for spectacle and respect for another's corporeality. Undoubtedly, being photographed beside corpses posed as archers is no different from being photographed beside Egyptian mummies or Bronze Age skeletons, save for the time at which these people died. There may, admittedly, be one further difference: whether, say, certain people themselves bequeathed their bodies for posthumous display, for the amusement of the public / the advancement of science / the enrichment of the collection's owner. Other human remains in the museums of the world are plainly unconnected with any actually expressed wish, made in life, that these ashes be left on view to countless groups of spectators and never again be buried according to one custom or another; and on the whole people usually feel no particular moral qualms when they see such exhibits in museum display cases. The difference one might name is precisely the introduction of an artistic element, that is, the arrangement of bodies in particular positions and figures, the participation of decorative elements, and in general the showing of them in attributes and surroundings unnatural to a dead person. Yes, but in that case what of the ordinary museum skeletons with painted-on clothing and accessories, likewise laid out and seated in rather unnatural "circumstances" outside their own graves? So it is hard to say which is the more flagrant: the grotesque, almost carnival manners of Hagens's morgue, or the displays of practically every historical and archaeological museum in the world.