King's Museum exhibitions

King's Museum hosts a range of temporary exhibitions which change three times each year, as well as permanent display of '100 Curiosities'.

Food Stories

A new exhibition exploring humanity’s relationship with food is open at King’s Museum until January 2013.

Organised by University of Aberdeen Museums and the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, Food Stories presents a fascinating insight into the way in which cultural differences change what we consider to be edible.

Among the exhibits are a selection of unusual foodstuffs from around the world. Visitors are asked what they might eat from a ‘menu’ which includes scorpion lollipops, sea cucumber, beaver, puffer fish and frogs.

Sue Bird, Communications Manager representing  the Rowett Institute, said the idea of the exhibition is to encourage visitors to think about the things which influence our food choices.

“Food Stories explores how what we eat affects our culture and how our culture affects what we eat,” she added.

“We think we make free choices about food but we don’t. What we put on our plates is partly dictated by cultural factors, our socio-economic group, religion and where we live.

“By showing people things which are considered delicacies in other countries – but which most of us wouldn’t consider eating – we hope to encourage visitors to think more about why we eat as we do.”

“The exhibition will take things back to the time we switched from a hunter-gather society to one of subsistence farming. This period changed man’s diet significantly, increasing reliance on one or two crops.  It will also track the changes as we began to import a greater range of foodstuffs and we began to eat for pleasure rather than survival.”

Dr Jenny Downes, Curator (Exhibitions and Science), University of Aberdeen Museums, said: ‘Food Stories includes fascinating objects from the from the University’s collections which demonstrate how our relationship with food has varied in different times and places.. These include forks from Fiji that were once thought to be used by cannibals, and Egyptian food offerings for the dead.

“The exhibition also has strong links to the north-east where food production and fishing have shaped our society.”

Food Stories opened at King’s Museum, High Street, Old Aberdeen, on September 4 and will run until January. Entry is free of charge. Opening hours are 10am – 4pm Monday, Wednesday-Friday, 10am – 7.30pm Tuesday and 11am-4pm Monday-Friday.

100 Curiosities

On display from April 2011
‘100 Curiosities’ is inspired by the BBC’s ‘History of the World in 100 objects’ project and an early university catalogue of ‘the principal curiosities natural and artificial preserved in the museum’.

This exhibition has relied on a hundred of its friends to select the objects to be displayed. Each person has chosen an object that has a personal resonance and has written a caption of 100 words to explain its significance. These include a historian who chose a Renaissance coin minted in Aberdeen, a designer who chose examples of wooden typefaces, an archaeologist whose choice was a tea-cup abandoned by an Arctic expedition and the father who chose a coffee pot, a primary school class who chose a 17^th century silver beaker, and an author who chose a prehistoric flint.

The exhibition is a contemporary version of a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, but instead of being open only to a privileged few or trying to tell a single story, it is the creation many people with different perspectives. It hopes to challenge the idea of curiosity by exploring how objects can inspire wonder, imagination and personal meanings.

Other exhibition spaces

There are also several small exhibition areas in the Old Aberdeen and Foresterhill campuses, including the Old Town House, James MacKay Hall and the MacRobert Building foyer.  Please contact museum staff for further details.